anna & eugeni bach suspends blue ring inside barcelona's MNAC

Anna & Eugeni Bach installs blue ring in barcelona’s mnac

Anna & Eugeni Bach completes Crown of Eyes, an installation hovering six meters above the central hall of Barcelona’s Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC). The twelve-meter-wide, celestial blue ring is suspended as a contemporary tribute to Francesc d’Assís Galí (1880–1965), one of Catalonia’s most visionary artists, the painter and educator behind the monumental dome murals of the Palau Nacional. The project forms the centerpiece of MNAC’s expansive exhibition on Galí, revealing his wide-ranging legacy as a painter, pedagogue, and exile whose influence rippled through generations, from Joan Miró to Llorens Artigas.

all images © Eugeni Bach

sixteen medallions shape a crown of eyes

Galí’s murals, painted over six months while perched on a fragile structure thirty meters high, crown the Palau’s great dome with 35 allegorical figures that fuse fine arts, science, religion, and earth into a cosmic fresco. Beyond his work as a muralist, Galí was also a radical educator. During the Noucentisme movement, he transformed art instruction through his Escola d’Art, urging students to look at the world differently. One of his mantras was to bring no tools to the field, only ‘a crown of eyes’ to observe nature. This pedagogical idea becomes the poetic seed of the structure by the Barcelona-based duo Anna & Eugeni Bach.

Floating towards the dome, where the eye naturally drifts, the Crown of Eyes anchors viewers between earth and sky. Sixteen medallions are embedded in its circumference, evoking the supporting columns of the dome and Galí’s ever-watchful metaphor. Rendered in a deep, radiant blue, the installation mirrors the color of the dome’s apex, inviting visitors to scan the murals with curiosity and intent, as Galí once taught his students to scan the Montseny Mountains.

Crown of Eyes is a spatial conversation with history, created in collaboration with architects Artur Muñoz and Virginia Mars and supported by Roger Molas, Claudia Senovilla, and engineers from Best and BetArq.

Anna & Eugeni Bach’s Crown of Eyes hovers six meters above the central hall of MNAC

UNCOVERING THE INVISIBLE

While Crown of Eyes floats in the central space of the museum, MNAC’s exhibition ventures deeper into Francesc d’Assís Galí’s expansive life and legacy. Often working behind the scenes, Galí helped shape the very foundations of Catalan modernity, yet he remained deliberately invisible, prioritizing teaching over personal fame and leaving little trace of his own ambitions. This curatorial effort makes visible what he preferred hidden, reclaiming his role as a key cultural agent of the early 20th century. From his mentorship of Joan Miró and Llorens Artigas to his directorial leadership at the Escola de Bells Oficis and the 1929 International Exposition, Galí emerges as a figure who consistently moved the needle while stepping out of the frame.

His most visible artistic legacy remains the dome of the Palau Nacional, painted with 35 allegorical figures over a grueling half-year suspended on high scaffolding. But the show also highlights his broader work as a painter, draftsman, muralist, and poster artist, tracing a career that moved fluidly through modernism, symbolism, noucentisme, and the avant-garde. A parallel exhibition, Galí: Exile and Evasion, at the Museum of Exile (MuME) in La Jonquera, reconstructs his abrupt departure from Spain during the Civil War and the ten years he spent in London. There, his relationship with surrealist painter Ithell Colquhoun introduced new ideas and directions into his later work. Together, the two exhibitions finally position Galí not only as a bridge between movements but as a vital thread in the cultural and political fabric of Catalonia.

the twelve-meter-wide, celestial blue ring is suspended like a phantom scaffold