Summer Exhibitions in Spain

Madrid
The Arts of Piranesi
CaixaForum Madrid
Through September 9

In addition to 300 engravings representing the variety of Piranesi's interests (architecture, archeology, city views, decoration, the Imaginary Prisons series, etc.), the show includes "reproductions of furniture and decorative objects in various materials from his series Antichità Romane, an ... audiovisual presentation that gives a disturbing depth and breadth to his Imaginary Prisons, and contemporary photographs by G. Basilico for his collection of engravings of Views of Rome, comparisons that allow the public to discover the three dimensionality, perspective and detail of Piranesi`s engravings."

According to El País, the digitalizaiton of the Imaginary Prisons by the Madrid-based Factum Arte studio allows "the camera to make a three-dimensional journey through their interiors, creating the sensation of walking through buildings that never existed."

Barcelona 
Le Corbusier & Jean Genet in the Raval;
Gordon Matta-Clark, "Office Baroque" Portfolio;
Roberto Rosellini Filming Beaubourg
MACBA (Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art)
Through October 21

This miscellany shows off items from the museum's permanent collection.

The first show aims to document the visits of Le Corbusier and Jean Genet to Barcelona in the 1930s,  "when both applied their critical eye to the city's streets." It includes works by Brassaï, Joaquín Torres-García, Alexander Calder, Leandre Cristòfol, Lucio Fontana, Salvador Dalí and Antoni Tàpies.

Corb came to Barcelona at the urging of José Luis Sert and with the hope of contracting a major new urban plan with the republican regional government of the Generalitat. Genet came to live and write about the low life in the city's Barrio Chino (red light district).

The second show brings together 46 works documenting building interventions by Matta-Clark in the last six years of his life, in the 1970s.

And the third presents Robert Rossellini's film on the opening of the Pompidou in Paris, which ties in with one of Matta-Clark's  last works.