This year we wanted the MNAC Christmas card to be chosen by an artist. We asked Mari Chordà (Amposta, 1942) to select a work from our collection in order to wish you a Happy New Year.

Mari Chordà is a multi-faceted creator, plastic artist, poet and promoter of collective feminist and socio-cultural projects. From 1965 to 1966 Mari lived in Paris where she began to create her own original paintings that addressed the topics of sexuality and the body using a language that lies between pop and abstraction. In 1968 she founded Lo Llar culture centre in Amposta and in 1977 she co-founded the pioneering women’s space La Sal Feminist Library Bar in Barcelona, later going on to establish the publishing house bearing the same name.

In the late 1960s Mari Chordà engaged in a highly original style of painting based on abstraction, and on the bright colours and the entertaining spirit of pop art, although addressing certain issues and taking on an iconography, which were way ahead of her time, linked to sexuality and nature.

In recent years Chordà’s work has witnessed a national and international revival at a host of exhibitions. As part of its collections, the MNAC retains her fundamental work Pregnant Self-Portrait, 1966-1967), in addition to Secretions, 1968), both of which are representative of her pop period. Their iconography, with reference to sexuality and the female body, is hugely personal and the style reflects the flat colours and ornamental effects of psychedelic pop.

See the work chosen by Mari Chordà in this video. What about you? What work from the Museum would you choose to say Happy New Year? Share it on social media using the hashtag #NadalaMNAC

MNAC, with women, with artists,

always!

On the occasion of International Women's Day (8M), the National Art Museum of Catalonia, for the tenth consecutive year, highlights its commitment to the daily fight against the discrimination of women in the fields of artistic and intellectual creation and production, as well as in their enjoyment, by offering free admission to all women.

The museum works every day to recover and bring visibility to the works of marginalized or overlooked women artists and integrate their contributions into its collections. This is a priority that has radically changed the museum’s acquisition policy, particularly regarding the contemporary art and photography collections, and, whenever possible, also the modern art collection. In 2024, the MNAC has acquired a total of 74 works by 16 women artists, 14 of whom will be represented for the first time in the collections. The museum also incorporates a feminist perspective into its projects by working with active artists, including the upcoming interventions by Mar Arza.

The activities scheduled for March and April include, among others, a conversation between the museum's photography curator Roser Cambray and photojournalist Anna Turbau, in connection with the inclusion of Turbau’s work in the National Photography Collection. There will also be a roundtable discussion with some of the authors represented in the new "Women for Women" gallery, as well as the presentation of the book-object Women Through Time: Stories of a Changing Barcelona. This is a project developed as part of the MNAC’s community program L’Obrador, where a group of older women from diverse backgrounds have shared their life stories in relation to works from the museum's collections. Additionally, gender-focused tours and family activities will take place, such as the storytelling session Little Stories, Great Women, featuring artist Teresa Lanceta, or the workshop Heroines.

In 2025, the rooms dedicated to contemporary art will feature some of the works acquired by the Generalitat through programs created for this purpose.

A total of 21 works will be displayed, 13 of which are by women artists, many of whom are outside the canon or are little known.

This new exhibition will make visible the role of contemporary art as resistance to Francoism and the central role of women in the aesthetic, emotional, and political fields.

While Room 81 will showcase works from the Francoist context, Dau al Set, and informalist abstraction, the room that concludes the modern art tour will be dedicated to exhibiting works by women artists who explore introspection and rebellion.