Barcelona Gallery Weekend: Which artists to follow this season

Image of the Prats Nogueras Blanchard gallery at Barcelona Gallery Weekend 2025. Photo courtesy of Barcelona Gallery Weekend.

From September 17 to 20, 2026, Barcelona Gallery Weekend celebrates its 12th edition and once again opens the city's art season with 25 galleries from Barcelona and L'Hospitalet de Llobregat and over 50 national and international artists. But beyond openings and tours, it's an opportunity to focus on some artists whose work allows for very different conversations in contemporary art.

This year, we've highlighted four names: Eugenio Merino, Pavel Korbička, María-Elena Pombo, and Lucía C. Pino. Their practices span sculpture, installation, light, textiles, metal, and materials as unexpected as oil. Among them appear questions of memory, power, identity, body, movement, and material transformation. This contrast is precisely what makes exploring them together interesting.

These are some of the artists we'll be keeping an eye on during these days and who will provide context for our exclusive guided tour of a selection of Barcelona galleries with experts.

Barcelona Gallery Weekend 2026: dates and key features of the edition

Barcelona Gallery Weekend is the event where the city's contemporary and modern art galleries inaugurate their season every September. If this is your first time encountering this format, we'll tell you about it in our guide on what a gallery weekend is and which are the most important in Spain. These are the key features of the 2026 edition:

• Dates: From Thursday, September 17 to Sunday, September 20, 2026.
• Where: 25 galleries in Barcelona and L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, featuring over 50 artists.
• Opening: All exhibitions open simultaneously on Thursday, September 17, from 12 pm for art professionals and from 6 pm for the general public.
• FLASH exhibitions: 13 projects that can only be seen during the four days of the event.
• Admission: Free at all participating galleries.

You can consult the complete program on the official Barcelona Gallery Weekend website. And if you're also following the Madrid art scene this September, check out our selection of galleries to visit for Apertura Madrid.

Eugenio Merino at ADN Galeria: twenty years unsettling power

ADN Galeria celebrates twenty years of collaboration with Eugenio Merino with MANIFESTO: 20 years with ADN Galeria, a commemorative exhibition that brings together representative works from these two decades and recovers projects that the gallery has supported since the beginning of its relationship with the artist. It is part of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend FLASH program, so you will only be able to see it during the four days of the event.

Born in Madrid in 1975, Merino has built a recognizable practice through his acid irony and his ability to confront symbols, popular images, and political discourses. He works with sculpture, painting, drawing, and installation to address mechanisms of power, human rights violations, and the contradictions of official narratives. If you want to delve deeper into his career, you can consult Eugenio Merino's trajectory on his profile.

The exhibition also allows for observing the evolution of these concerns over twenty years, with a growing emphasis on historical memory and the traces of the Franco dictatorship in contemporary Spanish society.

Why follow him? Because he rarely seeks a comfortable position for the viewer. His works use familiar references to introduce friction, sarcasm, and questions that continue to resonate after leaving the gallery.

Pavel Korbička at Al-Tiba9 Gallery: drawing movement with light

The Czech artist Pavel Korbička, who lives and works in Brno, transforms light, color, and space into sculptural materials. At Al-Tiba9 Gallery, which is dedicating its second solo exhibition to him, Dance Calligraphy presents monumental light installations that originate from the movement of the body during dance.

The origin of the pieces is particularly interesting: Korbička records the same dance sequence at different moments using reflective markers placed on the dancer's body. These displacements are then transformed into light sculptures. The exhibition, curated by Mohamed Benhadj, also incorporates photography, works on paper, and video documentation of performances.

Here, the spectator also plays an active role. As one walks around the pieces, the relationship between light, color, and architecture constantly changes.

Why follow him? Because his installations allow us to see something that usually disappears as soon as it happens: movement. The gesture of a body ends up transformed into a kind of three-dimensional calligraphy suspended in space.

María-Elena Pombo at Sorondo Projects: weaving with oil

Probably the most unexpected proposal in this selection is that of María-Elena Pombo, an artist and researcher born in Caracas and based in New York, whose work can be seen at Sorondo Projects, the Trafalgar Street space especially committed to Latin American artists and diaspora perspectives.

Pombo develops projects where materials, family histories, research, and speculative futures intersect. Her practice includes installations, sculptures, video, and performances, with a particular interest in site-specificity and ephemeral processes.

In the series Tejiendo el Petróleo (Weaving Oil), she takes this research to a material deeply linked to Venezuela's history. The artist uses oil from Cabimas, the city where the Venezuelan oil industry was born and also the place of origin of her maternal family, to create a material that she then literally transforms into thread.

The process was born alongside members of her own family and turns weaving into a particularly powerful metaphor: if oil helped to “weave” contemporary Venezuela, Pombo now takes that same material and weaves it back.

Why follow her? Because she manages to take an enormous theme (economy, territory, coloniality, oil identity) to a deeply personal scale. Oil ceases to be a political abstraction and appears connected to a grandmother, uncles, a city, and a family history.

Lucía C. Pino at Prats Nogueras Blanchard: sculpture, memory and materials in transformation

At Prats Nogueras Blanchard, Lucía C. Pino presents Karim Rosa, her first solo exhibition at the gallery, which opens on the occasion of Barcelona Gallery Weekend and will run until November 21.

The exhibition brings together autonomous pieces that build a dialogue between image and sculpture, working with tensions between materiality, memory, fragment, and composition. Pino primarily uses textiles and metal, incorporates sustainability and circularity criteria, and relates them to archives and other materials. If you are interested in this line of work, we recommend our selection of artists who work with sustainability and ecology.

Born in Valencia in 1977, the artist understands sculpture as an open field that intersects with language, design, and architecture. Her practice also incorporates collaborative and interdisciplinary processes, with a special focus on issues of class, gender, and race.

Why follow her? Because her work starts from very specific materials and languages to question established ways of constructing, ordering, and representing reality. Karim Rosa moves precisely in that still unstable terrain where forms can transform before becoming fixed.

Four artists, four entry points

Lucía C. Pino works from material, language, and the transformation of materials. Eugenio Merino confronts narratives of power and memory. Pavel Korbička turns movement into light. María-Elena Pombo brings oil, so linked to Venezuela's history, into an intimate, familial, and material realm.

It's hard to ask for four more different approaches. And perhaps that's why they work so well together as a starting point for Barcelona Gallery Weekend: they allow us to understand the extent to which the city's galleries bring together practices and questions that move in very distinct directions.

How to make the most of a gallery weekend if you're thinking of collecting

A gallery weekend is not just a cultural plan. It is also one of the best opportunities of the year to approach the primary market: galleries open their new exhibitions simultaneously, the program includes meetings with artists and gallery owners, and the atmosphere encourages informal inquiries.

If you are considering adding a work to your collection, some guidelines will help you buy thoughtfully, not impulsively:

• Look before deciding. Visit several galleries and return to the work that stayed in your mind after leaving.
• Ask without fear. Price, technique, whether it is a unique piece or an edition, and the artist's trajectory. These are common questions in any gallery.
• Ask for documentation. Every work should be accompanied by its certificate of authenticity.
• Think about your collection, not just the piece. Collecting is not about accumulating: each work should dialogue with what you already have and what you want to build.

If it's your first time, our guide on how to start collecting at an art fair, whose principles apply equally to a gallery weekend, and also our basic guide to starting your collection will be useful. And if you prefer to take the step with assistance, our private advisory service helps you define your profile and budget before buying.

Explore Barcelona Gallery Weekend 2026 with ArteGlobaL

On September 17 and 18, we will tour a selection of galleries accompanied by our experts, contextualizing the artists, works, and programs we encounter. It's a great opportunity to experience some of these works firsthand, understand the questions that drive them, and, above all, engage in a conversation about what's happening this season in Barcelona.

September 17
6:30 PM–8:00 PM

September 18
4:30 PM–6:00 PM

Guided tour of a selection of Barcelona galleries
Limited availability: 10 people per tour

Frequently asked questions about Barcelona Gallery Weekend 2026

When is Barcelona Gallery Weekend 2026 held?

From Thursday, September 17 to Sunday, September 20, 2026. It is the 12th edition and brings together 25 galleries from Barcelona and L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, featuring over 50 national and international artists.

Is there an entrance fee?

No. Admission to the exhibitions of participating galleries is free. The program also includes free activities such as guided tours, talks, and artist meetings, some of which require prior booking.

What are FLASH exhibitions?

These are exhibition projects designed to be seen only during the four days of the event. In the 2026 edition, there are 13, including MANIFESTO: 20 years with ADN Galeria, dedicated to Eugenio Merino.

How much does the ArteGlobaL guided tour cost?

€40 per person, with free access for Basic, Elite, and Diamond members of the ArteGlobaL Club. Spaces are limited.