La Casa Bloc, star of the new Domènec exhibition at MACBA

What do contemporary art and the Casa Bloc have to do with each other? Until 11th September, the answer can be found in the exhibition “Domènec. Not here, not anywhere”, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA).

The exhibition, which brings together some twenty works by Domènec from the nineteen-nineties to the present, offers a reflection on the social and architectural utopias of modernity.

In other words, the attempts that had been made, since the mid-nineteenth century, to solve social problems through architecture, with buildings that looked to bring about social justice and an improvement in people's living conditions. Domènec has transformed his research into a series of sculptures, maquettes, installations, photographs, videos and interventions in the public space.

And one of these buildings is Casa Bloc, the housing complex built at the instigation of the Generalitat de Catalunya during the Second Republic to accommodate those workers most in need. More specifically, at MACBA, the visual artist from Mataró shows us the contradiction implicit in this social housing complex ending up being occupied by military and national police after the Spanish Civil War.

Visits to Casa Bloc every Saturday

If you want to see in more detail the innovations that Casa Bloc brought to the architecture of its time, we remind you that, on Saturdays at 11 am,  you can sign up for the guided tour of the Museum-Apartment, reconstructed to its original design, and which forms part of the museographic displays of the Museu del Disseny.