As construction work on the Sagrada Família moves toward its completion — scheduled to coincide with the centenary of Antoni Gaudí’s death — Barcelona is preparing to host another of the most eagerly awaited cultural events of 2026. Following a complex restoration that has returned the rear façade and the secret courtyard to their original beauty, as we reported in Domus, Casa Batlló is inaugurating a new space devoted to contemporary art. It does so with a public project of striking visual impact: the monumental audiovisual intervention Hidden Order by Matt Clark, artist and founder of the London-based studio United Visual Artists (UVA).
The work will be presented to the public on January 31 and February 1, 2026, with a free video mapping event on the façade of the Modernist building, serving as a prologue to a site-specific exhibition entitled "Beyond the Façade". The exhibition will be installed in the new exhibition space on the second floor, historically occupied by residential apartments and, before the restoration, used as a conservation and maintenance laboratory.
After the contributions of Refik Anadol in 2023, Sofia Crespo in 2024, and Quayola in 2025, Matt Clark — the protagonist of this edition of Casa Batlló Contemporary, the artistic program dedicated to contemporary creation — has chosen to transform Gaudí’s façade into a large-scale audiovisual performance. The work reflects the architect’s organicist legacy, alluding to that Ordre Invisible that governs nature beyond the apparent irregularity of forms (and which is also the official motto of “Gaudí Year 2026”).
Clark worked at the boundary between perception and system, bringing out geometries, patterns, and rhythms that seem to animate the building’s morphology from within. “Gaudí once said that the straight line belongs to man and the curve to God”, Clark explains. “He believed that nature is governed by deeper geometric principles. As an artist, I have always been drawn to the systems hidden beneath the surface, those structures that silently shape the world around us”.
This dialogue is further strengthened through the musical and performative collaboration with composer Daniel J. Thibaut and choreographer Fukiko Takase, whose body — recorded through motion capture — is at the centre of the entire visual composition. The work is shaped by and upon the architecture itself, in a process that translates bodily movements into dynamic structures through the use of cutting-edge infrared cameras.
In this sense, United Visual Artists’ exhibition "Beyond the Façade" was conceived as a conceptual extension of Hidden Order. The exhibition unfolds through light installations, moving projections, and kinetic sculptures that address the theme of time while reflecting on the invisible laws that govern the natural world. The new exhibition environment designed by Mesura accommodates these interventions within a restored space that carefully balances architectural memory and contemporary creation. Defining the new identity of the room is a curved metal ceiling, screen-printed with a pattern of concentric ripples that evoke a drop of water falling onto a calm surface.
If the restoration of Casa Batlló’s colours has revealed the original modernity of this architecture, the light, sound, and movement devised by Matt Clark and United Visual Artists explore the universal order that inspired it, once again demonstrating that Gaudí’s practice does not belong to the past but continues to offer a fertile grammar for contemporary art.
Opening image: Casa Batlló. Photo Juhi Sewchurran
Exhibition: Beyond the Façade Where: Casa Batlló, Barcelona, Spain Dates: January 31, 2026 - May 17, 2026