'The Atomic Age' Exhibition
25 November 2026 – 16 May 2027 · 10:00
Sala d'Exposicions, el Raval, Ciutat Vella
The atomic age will never end. Triggered by the detonation of the first atomic test in the New Mexico desert in July 1945, its impact on life on Earth extends across a timescale that is extremely difficult to define. The exhibition explores this new experience of time and its links with science, politics and culture through 20th- and 21st-century art. From 1890 onwards, physics showed that the atom was not the ultimate element of matter, implying that reality was not as solid as previously believed. Artists reacted to these discoveries by combining science, mysticism and occultism, or by abandoning representation and adopting conceptual approaches seeking to make the imperceptible perceptible. With the invention of the atomic bomb and its devastating use by the United States against Japan in 1945, Western artists also produced a wide range of responses: aesthetic fascination with physics, new representations of the tragic and the sublime, and the spectacularisation of nuclear explosions. Protest movements emerging from the 1970s drove criticism of civilian and military nuclear development, which carried into new artistic practices inspired by ecology, feminism, anti-colonialism…
Source: Ajuntament de Barcelona · checked on 8 September 2026