Moco Museum Barcelona

Moco Museum Barcelona opened in Palacio Cervelló, a sixteenth-century palace at Carrer de Montcada 25 in the El Born district, as the second venue of the Amsterdam museum of modern and contemporary art. Alongside a collection that brings together names such as Banksy, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, KAWS and Takashi Murakami, and immersive digital rooms by teamLab and Studio Irma, the new museum announced what it described as Europe's first exhibition space dedicated to the NFT phenomenon.

Federico Clapis was among the artists presented in that NFT area at its opening. The installation view shows a darkened room in which digital works hang on the walls as large framed screens, like paintings. On one of them two white busts with smooth, faceless heads float against a black background, a recurring figure in Clapis' digital sculpture, where the human form is reduced to a pale, almost marble-like body confronted with technology. A second screen extends the same figure into a deep, rendered architectural space.

For Clapis, who had moved from physical sculpture and video art to crypto art, the presentation placed his tokenized works inside a museum collection rather than on a marketplace or a fair stand, in a palace setting and next to established names of pop and street art. The museum presented the room as the first of its kind in Europe, and Clapis' work was part of the selection that opened it.

Sources

• A Brand New Moco Museum is Born in El Born Barcelona — SWO Magazine
• New Modern Contemporary (Moco) Museum opens in Barcelona — eTurboNews
• Moco Museum Barcelona — Federico Clapis