El Museum of Contemporary Art of Ibiza (MACE) presents “The permanent present”, an exhibition of Miquel Barceló, which brings together thirteen recent paintings by the Mallorcan artist together with nine ceramics created between 2018 and 2024.
This is the third time Barceló has exhibited at MACE, following the exhibitions "Miquel Barceló in the Balearic Islands" (2003) and "Miquel Barceló – Barry Flanagan. Ceramics and Drawings" (2012). His return consolidates the museum's position as a benchmark for contemporary art on the island.
Curated by Enrique Juncosa, the exhibition opens on Saturday, June 21, 2025 from 19:00 p.m. to 21 pm and you can visit until November 16 from 2025.
The artist and his new work
Born in Felanitx, Mallorca, in 1957, Barceló is one of the most recognized voices in contemporary Spanish art. His work has traveled around the world, from Documenta in Kassel to the Venice Biennale, and is part of collections at the Centre Pompidou, the Reina Sofía Museum, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the Tamayo Museum, among many others.
In this new exhibition, Barceló delves into an aesthetic that refers to the paintings from Lascaux, Chauvet or Altamira. The canvases, worked with textures and volumes, evoke the rocky surfaces of the caves. The austere palette of whites, blacks and ochres reinforces that connection with what ancestral. Mammals such as bison, bulls or camels emerge as totemic symbols of a primitive Mediterranean spirituality.
The ceramics, on the other hand, provide a more playful and celebratory vision: fish, flowers, octopuses that seem to burst from the plate. Barceló describes them as “a way of painting”, where gesture, clay and color create a tactile dance of organic shapes, rooted in the Neolithic and direct experience with matter.
The MACE opens from Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 a.m. to 13:30 p.m. and Tuesday to Friday from 17:00 p.m. to 20:00 p.m.Closed on Mondays and holidays.
An invitation to look within, to rediscover our relationship with art, the earth, and the ancestral, from a contemporary perspective.
