MACBA, Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona

MACBA's real strength is depth in Spanish and Catalan conceptual and post-1945 practice specifically, built through named collector fonds such as Rafael Tous's rather than broad international coverage; a visitor looking for a general survey of twentieth-century art will find a narrower, more argued collection than at a larger encyclopaedic museum.

MACBA's founding ran backward from how most museums start. Barcelona's city council chose Richard Meier and Partners to design the building in 1986, and the MACBA Foundation was set up in 1987 and the MACBA Consortium in 1988, joining the Catalan government and the city council as its governing bodies, all before there was a settled permanent collection for Meier to plan around. He built anyway, on the Placa dels Angels in the then-rundown Raval district, producing a white, extensively glazed structure of about 120 by 35 metres that local press nicknamed the pearl against the older buildings around it. The museum opened on 28 November 1995, seven years later than its original target of the 1992 Olympics, with a founding collection of only around 1,100 works.

That founding-collection number is worth holding onto against what the museum has become: by 2015 the collection had grown to roughly 5,000 pieces, and in 2025 alone the museum added 330 works by 50 artists through acquisition and donation. The growth has come almost entirely from gift and consortium purchase rather than from a single founding bequest, which is one reason the collection reads as a set of distinct holdings, the Tous conceptual art fonds, the Tapies works, the international loans, rather than one collector's taste extended over time.

Antoni Tapies's installation Rinzen won the Golden Lion for painting at the 1993 Venice Biennale, three years before it found its permanent place in the MACBA building. Tapies had already used a version of the work in a 1989 stage set at Barcelona's Mercat de les Flors; the piece entered the museum in 1998 and has run through the building's floors since, described by the museum's own curators as integrating the different levels and unifying interior and exterior almost structurally rather than sitting inside one gallery room. The Japanese title, meaning roughly an awakening of conscience, was Tapies's own choice; he said he wanted the piece to activate a mechanism that would provoke a desire for profound contemplation rather than to decorate the stairwells it runs through.

That a single installation, rather than the building's architecture or its rotating shows, is what the museum treats as identifying itself says something about how MACBA understands its own collection: fewer icons, more works asked to do structural work inside the visit.

In March 2015, director Bartomeu Mari cancelled the exhibition La Bestia y el Soberano the day before it was due to open, after objecting to a sculpture by the Austrian artist Ines Doujak, Not Dressed for Conquering, which depicted the former Spanish king Juan Carlos and the Bolivian labour leader Domitila Chungara in a sexual act on a bed of SS helmets. Mari said he had only just seen the piece; the artist and the show's curators disputed that, producing a loan form for the sculpture that Mari himself had signed weeks earlier. MACBA staff and outside professional associations protested the cancellation publicly outside the museum, and speculation followed, given that the board of trustees' honorary president was the former Queen Sofia, wife of the king depicted, that the decision had come under outside pressure. Mari denied this directly, saying the board had nothing to do with it and that he had decided alone.

Four days after cancelling the show, Mari reopened it with the sculpture included, citing the near-unanimous demand from professional bodies and individuals that it go ahead; visitor numbers reportedly rose by around 48 percent once it did. The board of trustees then accepted his resignation and, at his own request, dismissed the two curators involved, Valentin Roma and Paul B. Preciado, who had been in their posts less than three months. Roma later returned to MACBA as its director in 2026.

In October 2017, the French collector Philippe Meaille announced he was withdrawing his loan to MACBA of the Art & Language collection, more than 500 conceptual works and the largest holding of that group's output anywhere, which had been on long-term deposit at the museum since 2010. The withdrawal followed the Catalan independence referendum of 1 October 2017, held despite Spanish police attempts to stop voting, and the constitutional crisis that followed it. Meaille told journalists the decision was not political but that he felt insecure about political issues regarding the collection and needed to ensure the works' security; MACBA's own public response was that his stated fears bore no relation to reality. The collection went instead to the Chateau de Montsoreau museum in France's Loire Valley, where it remains.

The episode sits alongside the Doujak affair as evidence that MACBA's exposure to Catalan and Spanish politics runs both ways: the museum has been accused of censoring art that was too political, and separately lost a major loan collection to a lender who judged Catalonia itself too politically unstable to leave art in.

Immediately behind Meier's building stands the Convent dels Angels, a working religious site since 1497, when a community of Dominican Tertiary Sisters settled next to the existing Verge dels Angels chapel. The Gothic church still standing today was built between 1562 and 1566 to a design by Bartomeu Roig, with a Renaissance portal added and, alongside it, the Capella del Peu de la Creu, built 1568-1569 and stated by the museum to be the only chapel from Barcelona's Renaissance period still standing in the city. The complex was restored through the 1980s as part of wider urban renewal in El Raval, transferred to MACBA in stages from 2003, and has been fully occupied by the museum since 2017.

The museum uses the church nave, now called Capella MACBA, for video art, installation and performance, with free entry and no booking required, deliberately leaving the medieval stone largely as found rather than converting it into a neutral white gallery. The upper floors of the convent complex hold the Centre d'Estudis i Documentacio, the museum's research library and archive, established in 2007, whose reading room sits under a vaulted, coloured skylight roof that has nothing in common with the glass and white render of Meier's building thirty metres away.

Reviewers are far more consistent about the building than about what is inside it. Richard Meier's white, glass-fronted design draws praise on its own terms even from visitors who found a given exhibition weak, and the plaza outside, a well-known meeting point for Barcelona's skateboarders, gets mentioned almost as often as anything in the galleries. Opinion on the temporary shows themselves splits hard between visitors who came specifically for contemporary and conceptual art and those who did not.