During one of his stays in Colliure, Henri Matisse painted a small-format landscape, La Moulade. With the characteristic colorist fury of Fauvism, the painting is made up of a series of vivid color patches: red, green, blue, yellow. The lines are entirely secondary. La Moulade measures only 28.6 x 35.7 centimeters, but for another Fauvist, André Derain, this painting is like "dynamite." This is recalled by Aurélie Verdier, chief curator of the Modern Collections of the National Museum of Modern Art - Centre Pompidou and also curator of the exhibition at CaixaForum Barcelona Chez Matisse. The Legacy of a New Painting, which opens its doors this Friday.

This year's art calendar is packed with major exhibitions, including a large-scale Marcel Duchamp retrospective at MoMA in New York, and two shows featuring Zurbarán and portraits by Jan van Eyck at the National Gallery in London. The list of big names, both Catalan and international, continues with Aurèlia Muñoz, Richard Avedon, and Matisse. Meanwhile, Barcelona, as UNESCO's World Capital of Architecture, will host around fifty exhibitions.

In this new season, the La Caixa Foundation has set out to "analyze reality from very diverse perspectives," as stated by Isabel Salgado, director of exhibitions, collections and CaixaForum+. For example, the first of this fall's proposals is the result of the dialogue between science and art, which is often found in CaixaForum exhibitions. It is We are nature, an immersive audiovisual experience produced by Oasis Immersive Studios and National Geographic. "It offers a powerful and contemporary look at biodiversity on Earth. It's an exhibition that premiered in Montreal on the occasion of the G-20 summit and is coming to Europe for the first time with the CaixaForum," says Salgado. The tour is divided into three immersive spaces that address the power of natural regeneration, the awareness that humans are part of it, and the resilience of nature. "It's also an exhibition that reminds us how powerful a tool art can be in civilization and that perfectly recognizes this idea of the optimistic message, the need for art and the universe that we work on," explains Salgado.