The Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, in collaboration with the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, is presenting Nonell and Claramunt. Urban registers.

The exhibition is set up as a dialogue between a selection of drawings by Luis Claramunt (1951-2000), from the series The Black Mark, and by Isidre Nonell (1872-1911), belonging to the Museum's Cabinet of Drawings and Prints, to illustrate the affinities between the two artists.

Nonell and Claramunt stood out in their day for their unconventional ways in every aspect of life.

The work of Isidre Nonell (1872-1911) was one of the earliest pictorial references for Luis Claramunt (1951-2000), who in his early days as an artist often used to visit the Museum. On these visits, Claramunt paid close attention to the painter's work, especially the pictures of poor neighbourhoods and Gypsy women.

Another point on which the two artists coincided is the importance they gave to drawing, as they both considered this technique a language independent from painting.

This exhibition is a parallel project to the exhibition Luis Claramunt. The Vertical Journey, being organised at the MACBA, a complete retrospective of the artist's work linked to the places he lived in.

We travel to one of the creative periods in art in Catalonia. During the 14th century, an exciting dialogue arose between the two poles of artistic modernity: on one side, France and the former Low Countries, and on the other, Italy. The result was a new style, the International Gothic Style, an art marked by contrasts: stylisation and naturalism, elegance and expressiveness, material luxury and technical skill. Catalonia enthusiastically adopted this new aesthetic code and became one of its most active production centres, with top-rate artists like Lluís Borrassà, Rafael Destorrents, Pere Joan and Bernat Martorell.

The MNAC has managed to gather a splendid collection of masterpieces from this fertile period. Among the most important are the panels from Bernat Martorell’s Retable of Saint George, kept in the Louvre, which can be admired in Catalonia for the first time more than a century after they were exported, and also a valuable selection of manuscripts with miniatures, items that are rarely made available to the public. They include the famous Missal of Saint Eulalia, from Barcelona cathedral, illustrated by Destorrents.

You are invited to steep yourself in one of the most intensely original moments in Gothic art and, especially, to enjoy all the details of these richly coloured works full of expressiveness and fantasy.