Opening on 27 June and running through 5 October 2025, this ambitious exhibition is being held simultaneously at Pavelló Victòria Eugènia and Palau Moja in Barcelona. Each of the two venues addresses some of the core issues for the conceptualization of a new model of museum, such as borders, redistribution, memory, archives, industrialization and coloniality. On view in Pavelló Victòria Eugènia are a series of artworks that invite reflection on the boom in large international exhibitions in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth, and the impact they had on our perception of the world.

The BBVA Collection is contributing to the exhibition with the loan of two seminal works within the Catalan arts. The first is a landscape by the artist Modest Urgell i Inglada in which one can readily note the influence of realism ―the result of his contact with the works of Courbet and Corot in Paris― as well as romanticism. That being said, Urgell forged a style all of his own, independent of any specific art movement. The result of his passion for travelling and his ability to analyse his surrounding environs, Urgell’s landscapes were inspired by over fifty different places, mainly in Catalonia―Olot, Barcelona, Girona― but also in other parts of the Iberian Peninsula and France. The second work from the BBVA Collection on loan to this major exhibition is the official poster for the 1888 Universal Expo, created by the Catalan artist Josep Lluís Pellicer Fenyé. The poster renders tribute to Barcelona, the first city in the country to host a Universal Expo, an event that left a lasting mark on the society of the time.