All Barcelona Museums with one single ticket

Imagine a city where you can see one of the most impressive Romanesque art collections and historical paintings that describe the Mediterranean countries during Middle Ages,  and then, just walking ten minutes you are on a modern building featuring an exceptionally comprehensive collection of works by Joan Miró. But don’t stop there. Continue dreaming about a gothic palace where nobles and knights have been replaced by Pablo Picasso works, a city where buildings seem a quarry or even a dragon…

 Now open your eyes. Welcome to Barcelona !!!

U232 Hotel invites you to discover it on an Art Weekend package, which includes:

• 2 nights stay at our U232 Hotel in Barcelona (on a single, double, triple or family room)
• Breakfast in the exclusive U232 buffet restaurant
• Welcome drink in the U232 bar (1 per person)
• 1 Art Ticket per person that entitle you to visit:
  • Museu Picasso: Picasso lived key years in Barcelona – those of his apprenticeship as an artist. He established and maintained strong links to the city throughout his life and it was here where he wanted his museum to be.
  • Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya: MNAC has the best known display of Romanesque frescoes in the whole of Europe, unique both for the quantity and for the quality of the works on show.
  • Fundació Joan Miró: The Foundation holds an exceptionally comprehensive collection of works by Joan Miró.
  • Centre Cultural Caixa Catalunya  - La Pedrera by Antoni Gaudí: Visit the most famous building bythe most famous architect in Barcelona.
  • Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona: One of the largests collections of Contemporary Art in Europe, in a building by Richard Meier.
  • Fundació Antoni Tàpies
  • Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona

Book now your Art Weekend in Barcelona and discover all the museums of the city !!!

Winners of the Photo Contest

Yesterday, February 1st, finished the voting in facebook and we have 2 winners for our Photo Contest.

 The contest has been a major success, we received more than 140 pictures. Thank you all for joining us and taking part.

Winners are:

• 1st PRIZE: Eva Fortuño, who will enjoy a 2-nights stay at wonderful U232 Hotel in Barcelona. Congratulations !!!
• 2nd PRIZE: Mandreja Marrón, who has a booking for two at Restaurant H1898. Enjoy your meal !!!

All the pictures will remain on exhibit at our facebook profile, on the album Fan Photos.

Stay tuned, as this was our first contest, but will not be the last…

Fashion as seen by Outumuro

Hotel Granvia is one of the favourite sets of the photographer

Under the heading “Outumuro. Looks” Disseny Hub Barcelona has put on display more than 200 images by fashion photographer, Manuel Outumuro. The retrospective exhibition, which can be seen until 25 April, covers twenty years of the photographer’s career

 All the top Spanish models have posed before Outumuro’s lense, such as Laura Ponte, Judit Mascó and Martina Klein, whose first photo was taken by him. “We are practically family” he said.

International models have also posed for Outumuro, including many famous figures, such as Penélope Cruz, Rossy de Palma, Alaska, Diane Kruger and Luz Casal, among many others.

Manuel Outumuro fuses the spirit of classicism with a search for elegance, an elegance which portrays femininity in its truest form. The photographer is drawn towards women’s fashion and the only job he ever rejected was taking photos of jeans. His images are timeless, though the photographer tells us that he works without looking for a particular style. “I take photos as I feel them” he says.

Outumuro’s influences are vast, from Harper’s Bazaar magazines of the forties and fifties to the world of cinema and literature.

Hotel Granvia commemorates this year its 75th anniversary. Stablished on 1935 in the former Palace of Serra-Chopitea family (built in 1870), this hotel has been part of Barcelona’s history and has seen all the majors events of the last century in the city. Its unbeatable location next to Passeig de Gràcia and Plaza Catalunya ensures the best of Barcelona to all its guests.

What: Outumuro. Looks
Photographic exhibition
Where: Disseny Hub Barcelona
Montcada, 12 - Ciutat Vella
When: until April 25th, 2010

Art on the Street with August Rodin in Barcelona

Art on the street (”Art al Carrer“), an initiative organised by the La Caixa Social Work Foundation with the City Council, is back in Barcelona for the third time. It has previously put on two exhibitions, on Manolo Valdés and Igor Mitoraj.

Rambla de Catalunya will become an outdoor museum from Friday 18 December to 6 February 2010 .

And this will be courtesy of the exhibition Art al carrer. Auguste Rodin a Barcelona, which is putting seven sculptures on display from the Musée Rodin in Paris, including The Thinker.

The exhibition was officially opened by Barcelona’s Mayor, Jordi Hereu, in the company of Eixample’s District Councillor, Assumpta Escarp, the secretary-general of the La Caixa Foundation, Lluís Reverter, and the director of the Musée Rodin in Paris, Dominique Viéville.

Rodin’s exhibition includes the famous work The Thinker and six studies of the six leaders making up The Burghers of Calais. You can see it on the Rambla de Catalunya, between Carrer Consell de Cent and Carrer Diputació.

Source: www.bcn.es  |  NN Hotels: www.nnhotels.com

Exhibition: Abracadabra. Illusionism & science

A room with a vanishing point, an anamorphic painting, Newton’s wheel, tricks of light in water, a levitation and even a teletransportation… These are just some of the surprises in store for visitors at the CosmoCaixa, in the exhibition Abracadabra. Illusionism and science.

The exhibition will leave children and adults gobsmacked with its play on reality and illusion. The exhibition has magic and science play with visitors, and the results can be confusing for them: where does the reality start and end?

When it comes to interpreting the world around us, the brain mixes up what it sees, senses, perceives, smells as well as what it remembers and expects. Visitors to the exhibition will discover how the senses work together.

The exhibition’s organisers have not forgotten about cinema either, considered the greatest of all illusions, and have included screenings of works by the pioneer cinema directors Méliès and Chomón, to illustrate how the seventh art got off the ground. Visitors can also experience a phantasmagoria show and admire items donated from Girona’s Cinema Museum.

Exposició ‘Abracadabra. Il·lusionisme i ciència’  |  End date: 31/12/2009
Place: CosmoCaixa Barcelona | www.bcn.es

NN Hotels: www.nnhotels.com

BAC! 09 - The Barcelona Contemporary Art Festival

The Barcelona Contemporary Art Festival BAC! 09 opens Pandora’s box. At least, this year’s date with international creation is subtitled “Pandora’s Boxes“. An ironic title, as we won’t find all humanity’s ills there, rather an assertion of feminine art, but without any of the clichés normally associated with it.

Neither social criticism nor discourses on gender discrimination; the sixty-or-so female artists whose works are on display in BAC!’s main exhibition at the CCCB, free of charge, prefer humour, irony and a fresher perspective.

This is what we find in Ariadna Arnés’s photos, in Hanamaro Chaki’s illustrations and Bárbara Sánchez Barroso’s embroidery. You can be sure to find installations and videoart there too, such as those by Marta Jiménez Salcedo and Ms Woolman.

One of the highlights of this tenth BAC! is the section entitled “BAC! CAM“. This will feature one of the fullest retrospectives on women’s videoart.

To be more specific, the programme called “Indomitable Women” reviews female videoart over the last forty years, from the field’s pioneers like Maya Deren, celebrity names like Yoko Ono and Joan Jonas, up to more recent creators like Dora García, among others.

X Festival Internacional Barcelona Art Contemporani - BAC Pandora’s Boxes  - website Festival
From01/12/2009 to 03/01/2010
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB): C/Montalegre, 5

NN Hotels: www.nnhotels.com

Nivell Zero. Places that do not exist (Google Earth 1.0)

Isaki Lacuesta

and Isa Campo claim a reality above and beyond technology in their exhibition being held at the Suñol Foundation entitled Places that do not exist (Google Earth 1.0). Some people believe computers know everything, so if something fails to appear on Google, that means it does not exist.

These include real places located in Columbia, Ecuador, Russia, Australia and Spain that are hidden by Google Earth, either for being protected areas (military facilities, government buildings and nudist beaches) or for having been transformed by property speculation.

During the period between December 2007 to September 2008, Lacuesta and Campo visited each of these “non-existent” locations on the map, to show how things really are over there. The exhibition features the photos and recordings they made for reclaiming the need for continuing a direct and human vision of our world, without false intermediaries.

Exhibition ‘NIVEL ZERO Lugares que no existen (Google Earth 1.0)’ 
From 01/10/2009 to 28/11/2009
Fundació Suñol -> Pg Gràcia, 98 - Eixample

NN Hotels: www.nnhotels.com

FotoPres 2009 at CaixaForum Barcelona

The 135 photographs corresponding to the six projects awarded prizes and grants are now being shown at CaixaForum until February 2010 to prompt visitors to think deeply about living conditions in countries in conflict.

The competition, which came about thanks to a determination to recognise the then little-valued work of photojournalists, has this year awarded the winning prize to Spaniard Emilio Morenatti for his project ‘Gender violence in Pakistan’.

The selection tells the stories of ten Pakistani women based on their faces, disfigured because of family disputes or by rejected suitors. Just through these faces the photographer succeeds in portraying the cruelty of gender violence and the tragedies faced by these women for the rest of their lives.

Keeping to the subject of violence, second-prize winner Walter Astrada and his report ‘Post-electoral violence in Kenya’, made in that African country during the months of January and February 2008.

Distancing himself from the other prize winners, third-prize winner Alfonso Moral portrays Lebanon’s social reality in ‘Lebanon, between sea and fire‘ from two opposing angles: the tranquility of the sea and the changes brought by the conflict.

Besides the three winners, La Caixa awarded six grants to produce documentary projects, the results of which can be seen in the exhibition. It includes works by Lurdes R. Basolí, Fosi Vegue, Marta Ramoneda, Aleix Plademunt, Mikel Aristregi and José Luis Expósito.

This year 316 works were entered for the competition, the highest level of participation in the FotoPres Awards since it was first held in 2003.

FotoPres’09 Exhibition | From 30/10/2009 to 21/02/2010
CaixaForum Centre Social i Cultural -> Av Marquès de Comillas, 6 Sants-Montjuïc

NN Hotels: www.nnhotels.com

Barcelona Snow Show 2009

This year Barcelona will be getting snow before the mountains. And that’s because the Montjuïc Olympic Stadium will be the main location, on the 7 and 8 November, for the first Barcelona Snow Show, a pioneering event in Spain that will feature the world’s best snowboarders and freestyle skiers.

The Barcelona stadium will be turned into a giant ski slope, where a 35-metre-high Big Air will be set up, which will be the highest ramp in Europe for a Snowboard World cup competition.

Thousands of snowboarding and freestyle skiing specialists will stop off in Barcelona to take part in the LG FIS Snowboard World Cup Big Air and the International Freeski Big Air.

The Barcelona Snow Show also aims to become the snow season’s big inauguration festival and the Olympic Stadium will have a large area featuring exhibitions that specialise in the sector with parallel activities open to the public.

The competition is expected to be held on Saturday, 7 November, followed by the parallel activities on Sunday, 8 November. The commercial exhibition, however, will be held over both days.

Barcelona Snow Show  Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys -> Avinguda de l’Estadi 54

NN Hotels: www.nnhotels.com

Barcelona Design Week

The fourth BCN Design Week will be one of the big events on the IF Barcelona programme with sessions dealing with the main challenges facing this European project. BCN Design Week 2009 runs from 26 to 30 October and is one of the events promoting and debating design not to be missed in the international diary .

Businesses of diverse productive or services sectors, professionals and experts of the world of design as well as prestigious speakers will give themselves appointment in a platform of experiences in which the main topics to be addressed are Design Thinking & Creativity, Design Management, Mobile Design or Creativity and family business, among other topics.

The activities to be orgnized for this fourth edition will be held at top venues such as CaixaForum, MACBA, Casa Llotja de Mar and the Mies van der Rohe pavilion.

The 2009 BCN Design Week acquires special relevancy due to the celebration of the European Year of Creativity and Innovation.

More inf@: www.barcelonadesignweek.es  |  Design Center Barcelona: www.bcd.es

NN Hotels: www.nnhotels.com

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