The recent awarding of the 2026 Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts to Patti Smith—one of the most prestigious cultural distinctions in the Spanish-speaking world—offers an opportunity to celebrate the career of one of the most influential figures in contemporary culture. Singer, poet, writer, and intergenerational icon, Smith has developed a body of work that transcends the boundaries of music, establishing her as a central voice in shaping the artistic sensibility of the last several decades.

Widely regarded as one of the precursors of punk and a defining force in the renewal of musical language during the 1970s, Patti Smith redefined the role of language within popular music, introducing into song a poetic, political, and performative intensity previously uncommon in the realm of rock. Her emergence represented not only a sonic transformation, but also an aesthetic and cultural one, projecting an image of the artist as radically free—an image that continues to resonate across generations of musicians, writers, and visual creators.

Yet to reduce her legacy to music alone would be insufficient. Smith’s practice has always been shaped by a deeply interdisciplinary vocation, in which writing, image, performance, and thought converge as inseparable parts of a single creative project. Her work exists precisely at this intersection, blurring the boundaries between poetry and song, autobiography and myth-making, document and performative gesture.

Within this framework, her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe—immortalized by Smith herself in Just Kids—constitutes one of the most emblematic episodes of a career defined by the intersection of life and creation. More than a biographical anecdote, that bond embodies a foundational moment within the New York counterculture of the late 1960s: a creative alliance grounded in mutual admiration, artistic experimentation, and the shared construction of new forms of sensibility.

One of the most remembered episodes of that relationship took place during one of their final photographic sessions together, when Mapplethorpe handed Smith a blue morpho butterfly to incorporate into the portrait. Smith would later recall the gesture as the introduction of a “symbol of immortality,” an image that now resonates as an eloquent metaphor for her own legacy: that of an artist whose influence continues to expand far beyond her own time.

To celebrate Patti Smith today is to recognize not only one of the most singular voices in contemporary music, but a total artist whose work has profoundly transformed the relationship between art, poetry, music, and identity in the visual and sonic culture of the last half century.

Within the landscape of twentieth-century Catalan art, Joan Ponç (1927–1984) occupies a singular position. His work seems to emerge from a territory of its own, populated by ambiguous creatures, distorted characters and scenes that oscillate between the dreamlike and the unsettling. Rather than depicting the visible world, Ponç constructed an inner universe where imagination becomes a way of thinking.

Working in postwar Barcelona—a cultural context marked by isolation and censorship—Ponç found in imagination a space of freedom. His drawings and paintings unfold a powerful visual language filled with symbols, hybrid figures and presences that appear to surface from the darker zones of the mind. Within his imagery, the grotesque, the magical and the metaphysical coexist.

In the late 1940s he became one of the founding members of Dau al Set, a group that played a key role in the renewal of artistic practices in Catalonia. Alongside artists and thinkers such as Antoni Tàpies, Modest Cuixart and poet Joan Brossa, the collective created a space of experimentation that engaged with surrealism, dada and the broader European avant-gardes. Within this context, Ponç’s work stood out for its visionary character: a figurative language driven more by an internal logic than by the observation of reality.

His characters—with exaggerated eyes, fragmented bodies or unsettling gestures—inhabit ambiguous environments where the human and the fantastic blur together. These are not narrative scenes in a conventional sense. They are visions. Apparitions that condense mental states, intuitions or existential tensions.

In 1953 Ponç moved to Brazil, where he lived for almost a decade. This period proved decisive for the development of his work. In cities such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro he came into contact with new artistic networks, and his paintings acquired greater formal and chromatic complexity. Yet the core of his imagery remained unchanged: that universe populated by strange presences that seem to move between the visible and the invisible.

Throughout his career, Joan Ponç maintained a position that was difficult to classify within the dominant artistic tendencies of his time. While many artists of his generation turned towards abstraction, Ponç persisted in a radical form of figuration, charged with symbols and inner resonances.

Today, his work continues to fascinate for its ability to open a space of estrangement. A territory where painting becomes vision, and where each figure seems to emerge from the threshold between imagination, dream and the unknown.

The Museo Nacional de Antropología presents “La Quema. A Retrospective” by Elena del Rivero

The Museo Nacional de Antropología presents “La Quema. A Retrospective”, a major exhibition dedicated to the artist Elena del Rivero, as part of the museum’s Visiones críticas programme and its 150th anniversary celebrations. The exhibition is on view until 24 May 2026.

Curated by Mateo Feijoo, the exhibition takes as its starting point an action developed by the artist in 2024 in San Pedro Fiz de Vilar (Ourense), where she presented a series of works in domestic and rural spaces before subjecting them to a collective burning ceremony with the participation of the local community. This gesture articulates a reflection on memory, transformation, and the connections between art and shared life.

The exhibition brings together collages, assemblages, and works from the Diarios series, incorporating reclaimed materials and everyday objects transformed into affective archives. The retrospective is complemented by the presentation of Canto para un monumento funerario, produced in collaboration with students from EINA Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art de Barcelona and presented at the Panteón de España, expanding the collective and pedagogical dimension of the project.

“La Quema” offers a transversal view of Del Rivero’s practice, where the act of burning is understood not as destruction, but as transformation and passage, in an ongoing dialogue between territory, memory, and community.

Forty years ago, Miralda initiated a project that radically exceeded the conventional boundaries of art. Honeymoon Project was neither a traditional exhibition nor a single performance, nor a work confined to a fixed moment in time. It was an extended, expansive, and deeply symbolic process that unfolded over six years, crossing cities, cultures, languages, and communities.

The project originated from an image as poetic as it was provocative: an imaginary courtship culminating in the symbolic marriage between two monuments charged with history and power—the Statue of Liberty in New York and the monument to Christopher Columbus in the port of Barcelona. By turning these monuments into the protagonists of a love story, Miralda stripped them of their customary solemnity and transformed them into living figures, capable of moving, relating, and mingling with people.

One of the project’s most radical gestures lay precisely in this act of descent: allowing monuments to step down from their symbolic pedestals. Over the years, Honeymoon Project activated a series of public rituals—engagements, announcements, exchanges of love letters, gifts, and celebrations—in which thousands of anonymous participants took part, alongside institutions, cities, and professionals from fields as diverse as fashion, politics, and gastronomy. This was not a work to be observed from a distance; it was a work to be experienced.

Cultural exchange formed the true engine of this “honeymoon.” Gifts sent from cities around the world acted as symbolic ambassadors of their places of origin: hybrid, extravagant, and festive objects that spoke of urban identities, collective imaginaries, and cultural stereotypes. Each presentation became a public event, reinforcing the performative and communal dimension of the project.

Food occupied a central place within this network of actions. Banquets, offerings, recipes, printed menus, and edible materials from both the New and the Old World became artistic matter. Eating, sharing, and combining ingredients functioned as a direct metaphor for historical exchange between continents, while also placing the body—and the senses—at the core of the artistic experience.

Alongside celebration, Honeymoon Project consistently acknowledged its contradictions. The idyll between the two monuments also evoked the violent history of colonization, inherited power imbalances, and tensions that continue to persist today under contemporary forms of neocolonialism. The project unfolded against a particularly charged backdrop: the centenaries of both monuments and the Quincentenary of the “Discovery” of the Americas, marked by both official commemorations and strong anticolonial protests. Within this context, the work did not offer a single, fixed position but instead opened a space of friction, ambiguity, and debate.

Language was another fundamental territory of exploration. Words, translations, proper names, and signatures shifted between languages and meanings, revealing how language itself operates as a site of power, misunderstanding, and cultural appropriation.

Today, forty years after its inception, Honeymoon Project remains strikingly relevant. In a world where national symbols are once again hardening and cultural boundaries seem to be reasserted, Miralda’s project reminds us of the critical potential of fiction, ritual, and collective celebration. More than a work about the past, it was—and continues to be—an open question about how we coexist, the stories we tell, and who is invited to take part in shaping them.

The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain has inaugurated its new space facing the Louvre with the group exhibition Exposition Générale, a show that brings together emblematic works from its collection and marks the beginning of a new chapter for the Parisian institution.

Among the participating artists is Peter Halley, presenting the installation OMG! (2014), created in collaboration with Italian designer and architect Alessandro Mendini. The piece, characterized by its vibrant geometric planes and its dialogue between art, design, and architecture, occupies a central place in the exhibition, reaffirming Halley’s relevance within the international contemporary art scene.

The new building of the Fondation Cartier, designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, opens its doors with this ambitious exhibition that celebrates the diversity and dynamism of contemporary art. Exposition Générale also includes works by Bodys Isek Kingelez and other renowned artists from the collection.

The exhibition has received wide coverage in international media such as The Times, Numéro Magazine, and WWD, where the installation by Halley and Mendini has been highlighted as one of the emblematic images of the event.

Exhibition details:
Exposition Générale
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris
From October 25 to August 23