Photos & Collages | Tribute Miralles

With the “Miralles” events, Barcelona wants to remember the architect Enric Miralles and pay tribute to him on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of his death.

Enric Miralles (Barcelona, 1955 – Sant Feliu de Codines, 2000), who died prematurely at the age of 45, is one of the fundamental figures of Catalan and Spanish architecture, and is internationally recognized for his work and for his teaching at many universities around the world.

The exhibition presented here aims to show the legacy of Enric Miralles through his photographic eye and the creation of his collages, an important personal and poetic tool in his creative process, both to explore projects and to document interesting moments of travel or of his life.

Inspired by David Hockney -Miralles defined his photomontages as “Hockney photos”- and also by Gordon Matta-Clark or surrealist artists, these compositions aim to experiment with the simultaneity of perception.

As Miralles himself explains, these montages aim to make people forget the tradition of perspective and its way of representing and conceiving the physical reality of things. The photomontages avoid the single point of view and introduce a certain deconstruction, almost like simultaneous sketches with multiple visions of the same moment. They are fundamental to understand the work of Enric Miralles.

In the exhibition you will find photomontages from different periods, from 1989 -the year he started using them- to 2000, with different techniques (montages, collages, cut-outs…).

The exhibition is organized chronologically, but also groups together the themes of documenting sites and works; the creation of projects; learning while traveling, looking at other architects and architectures, and the affectionate look at moments of one’s own personal life, moments often mixed together.

Models, notebooks, sketches and drawings directly related to the subject of the assembly are added. Most of these materials are presented to the public for the first time and are unpublished.