Event
Exhibition ‘In Sorolla’s Sea with Manuel Vicent’
Palau Martorell opens its rooms to one of the most ambitious exhibitions devoted to Joaquín Sorolla in Barcelona, a proposal that can be visited from 5 December to 6 April 2026. Under the title ‘In Sorolla’s Sea with Manuel Vicent’, the exhibition brings together 86 masterpieces from Museu Sorolla and its Foundation, but does so from an unprecedented perspective: a literary curatorship created by Manuel Vicent that invites visitors to sail between painting and words.
About this event
Far from offering a conventional tour, the exhibition proposes an emotional journey. Vicent arranges Sorolla’s marine scenes—from L’hora del bany and El balandret to L’arribada de les barques and Pescadora amb el seu fill—to construct a narrative that combines memory, observation and Mediterranean sensibility. Each room functions as a resonance chamber in which Sorolla’s light enters into dialogue with the writer’s prose, illuminating shared themes: childhood by the sea, life in coastal villages, the mystique of Levantine light and the inexhaustible presence of the Mediterranean as a shared identity.
Structured in four chapters (‘El subconscient està ple d’algues’, ‘Un drama naturalista sota la llum del Mediterrani’, ‘Estiuejants burgesos al Cabanyal’ and ‘Al mar de Xàbia’), the exhibition reveals how the sea is not merely a setting for Sorolla and Vicent, but a moral and aesthetic language.
Accompanied by a catalogue containing the full text written by Vicent for the occasion, the exhibition turns Palau Martorell into a port where two ways of looking at the same horizon converge. An invitation to contemplate Sorolla’s work through a renewed and deeply literary sensibility.