Internationally renowned visual artist Miquel Barceló will discuss his intense and long-standing relationship with literature which finds echo in his paintings, watercolours, and sculptures that are presented at a new exhibition at DOX. In conversation with curator and poet Enrique Juncosa a writer and bibliophile Alberto Manguel. 

In partnership with Instituto Cervantes Praga.

Miquel Barceló is one of Spain’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, known for his relief-like mixed-media paintings, expressive bronze sculptures, ceramic works, and monumental installations. He experiments with non-traditional materials such as volcanic ash, food, seaweed, sediments, and homemade pigments but at the same time remains rooted in the grand tradition of painting, following in the footsteps of Picasso and Goya. He gained international recognition after his participation in the São Paulo Biennial (1981) and documenta 7 in Kassel (1982), and he represented Spain at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). His work has been exhibited at institutions around the world, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1996), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (1999), and Musée du Louvre in Paris (2004), where he showed over three hundred drawings illustrating Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

Enrique Juncosa is a curator, cultural manager, and poet. He was the director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin for a number of years (2003–2012), and he has also worked at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2003–2012) and the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno in Valencia (1998–2000). As a curator he has realised over eighty exhibitions featuring artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dorothy Cross, Howard Hodgkin, James Coleman, and Terry Winters. He curated the current exhibition of Miquel Barceló at DOX, and he is also preparing a retrospective of Jasper Johns for the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, which will open in 2026. He lives in Mallorca and Mexico City.

Alberto Manguel is a respected Argentine-Canadian writer, translator, essayist, and promoter of reading. His probably best-known book, A History of Reading (1996), is an engrossing exploration of the role of reading in human culture, from ancient times to the present day. One of Manguel‘s mentors in the 1960s was the then already blind Jorge Louis Borges to whom the author would read aloud. Manguel has received numerous international awards for his work as an author and editor. Some of his renowned works include With Borges (2004), Reading Pictures (2000), The Library at Night (2006), and The Traveler, the Tower, and the Worm (2013).  In April 2024, Manguel inaugurated a new Centre for Research into the History of Reading in Lisbon, which has been built around his personal library of 40 000 books.