Barcelona Street Art: The Gallery That Opens When the Shops Close

At some point, walking around Barcelona with my music on and my brain empty, it hit me: there was art everywhere. Not in a gallery. On shop shutters, up and down every street, like it was just a normal thing here. I couldn't stop noticing it, or wondering why so much of it was so good.

Mostly this was the Gothic Quarter. I couldn't point you to one corner, it's everywhere in there, but that's the oldest, most walkable part of the city, and the one that felt like home base for the whole stay.

When we started our living experiment abroad, we'd work mornings and into the early afternoon, then head out late in the day for walks, or I'd get to the beach. I'd planned to shop right after work ended most days, pick up t-shirts, souvenirs, figure out what to bring home for friends. What I'd forgotten: siesta. From about two to four, the shops shut, the Spaniards go home for lunch and a nap, then come back out and stay out all night. Great system. Bad news for someone trying to squeeze in shopping on a work break.

Except it turned out to be a gift. Not only should I not have been spending money right then anyway, but I had the streets to myself. No crowds, nobody else shopping, restaurants shuttered for the changeover between lunch and dinner. Just an open path for wandering.

On one of those walks I started really noticing the art on the closed shop security gates. When the shops pull those metal doors down for the afternoon, they become a canvas. I thought it was so cool. I didn't get to shop, but I was saving money by not shopping, and getting a free gallery tour of street artists in exchange.

I don't know how much of this is sanctioned by the shop owners. Some of it looks deliberate, like someone spent real time on it, tied it to the shop somehow, or just made something beautiful. Some of it looks scrawled in a hurry, in the middle of the night. I don't know the truth of it.

I did ask around, because I was curious. My Airbnb landlord was in the lobby one day and I asked him: the art on the shutters, is it commissioned, or are artists just doing it on their own? He rolled his eyes and said, sometimes. Sometimes commissioned, mostly just people doing it because they want to. He could tell I was a fan, so he was probably being more diplomatic than usual, but the impression I got was that he thought of them as vandals, and that no one had actually agreed to have their garage door painted.

Maybe that's true for some of it. But when you look at how much of this there is, block after block, it's hard to believe none of it was chosen by the shop owners. Otherwise they're the luckiest vandalism victims in the world, with gallery-quality art on their doorways. I'd take that kind of vandalism on my own house. I can see the other side too. If you like things neat and tidy, I understand not wanting unauthorized art on your door. But to me it reads as consented, or commissioned, one or the other. I'm going to keep digging on it. Either way, it was one of the best things I found wandering the city. Just enchanting, the range of styles, one after another.

So I started photographing it, wherever I found it, whatever moved me. I'd love to know how this actually started. In a city this open and this bright, it makes sense that the art would be too.

It also got us through the heat. Some days it was brutal, and hard to stay motivated to walk anywhere, especially with my thirteen-year-old, who was tired and hormonal and living in a strange place for the first time and sometimes just needed to sit down, especially at the hottest part of the day. But a walk with a destination worked. We'd head out trying not to be miserable, trying not to sweat through everything, and then hit a good door and stop: wow, look at this one. Easy distraction from the heat, when there was something shocking or beautiful, or something that reminded us of home, or a story to make up about what we were looking at.

It keeps the streets feeling alive, too. It's not just the architecture and the sunshine hitting the buildings just right, the railings lit up, laundry flapping overhead. Sometimes the light hits a piece just right, and a spray-painted wall glows, and it makes the whole street.

I think it's also just inspiring, seeing work like this out in the open, with no real constraints on it. Unbridled, and it makes you rethink what spaces could hold art. Why do we assume art belongs in a frame on a wall? Why not on the ugly door of a shop?

It got me thinking about where I'd want to see more of this. I dream of the day cars actually look interesting, when you'd walk down the street and go, look at that one. Right now they come in six colors, none of them with so much as a stripe. What else are we missing? Where else could we be looking?

The scale of it gets me too. These artists are working at human scale, which isn't really my phrase to borrow, but it applies. You're standing in front of a wall with a spray can, and you can only back up as far as the street lets you.

What must it take to get good at that? Where do you even practice, without somewhere that lets you? Is it all guerrilla artists, learning on walls without permission, or is more of it commissioned than I think? Did they start small, with paint like the rest of us, or did they always have a can in hand? I don't know, but I like that art can make you ask the question. Walking around, I'd make up stories about how these artists live. Some hip-hop Hemingway situation. More likely it's just some guy who works a day job for the city and comes home wishing he could paint for a living, and can't, because it doesn't pay.

Then there's a wall that's just portraits, leaders and heroes of someone's. I don't know whose, or what they stand for, but if this were my country and it were a mural of a political figure, it would be a rallying cry, an identifier of values, the way street art usually works. I like this one anyway, an ugly cement wall turned into something worth looking at. The best of it doesn't come from an art academy. It comes from the street, and from whoever decides to pick up a can.

Then there's the subject matter that's a draw on its own. Like the tile piece that's Instagram famous now, the one people come specifically to see. A modern take on mosaic, a nod to Gaudí, made of small printed photos that build into one large image the farther back you stand. It makes you think about perspective, how distance changes what you're looking at.

It's called El món neix en cada besada, The World Begins with Every Kiss, and unlike the shutters, this one isn't a mystery. Joan Fontcuberta made it in 2014 out of four thousand photos sent in by Barcelona residents on the theme of moments of freedom. The city commissioned it for its tercentenary. So at least one piece settles the argument I was having with my landlord.

It was hard to actually see, because of the crowds, and the rudeness of people taking selfies and group shots in the middle of it, trampling the diners at the courtyard restaurant below. People would plant themselves in the middle of the café for a photo, ropes and signs and actual seated customers be damned. Rude.

So instead, since the tile mural is clearly getting its due, I'll recommend the sweet little Vietnamese restaurant that takes a tourist beating every day and still turns out a solid curry without an attitude to match.

None of this is why I went out walking in the first place. I was just trying to get away from my desk, which is a whole other thing I could talk about. But it's what I came back with.

So here's a selection of what I found. See what you think, and send us yours, we'd love to build a wall of street art from your photos. Email us at info@craftandbond.com.