If a gallery established in the Swiss city of Lucerne decides to open a second location, the most logical choice would be to first look to the cities closest to home or to one of Europe’s major art capitals. Barcelona would not, therefore, be the most obvious choice for beginning a new chapter. But KALI Gallery has chosen to step outside this logic: to cross the Alps and make its move to the Catalan capital.
On September 12, the Swiss-born gallery will open its new headquarters in Barcelona at Espai Capellans (Capellans, 13), in the heart of the city. The space, long linked to the Barcelona art scene, now begins a new phase as the gallery’s second permanent location and its first outside Switzerland.
The exhibition Smoke, Clouds and Elevation will serve as the gallery’s introduction to Barcelona: a solo exhibition by artist Nils Nova, one of KALI Gallery’s regular artists, which will bring together a new series of paintings as well as an installation created specifically for Espai Capellans, designed to integrate into the architecture of the space and its historic stone walls.
The question is, therefore, inevitable: what has led KALI Gallery to choose Barcelona, among all the possible options? What did he see in Barcelona’s art scene from his base in Lucerne that made him decide that this was where he wanted to take the next step? "Barcelona had been on my mind for quite some time," says Nicolai Kalinowsky, founder and director of KALI Gallery. Beyond the city’s history and architecture, he is especially attracted by "its vibrant contemporary art scene," as well as the combination of its distinct Catalan cultural identity, international outlook, and location by the sea, which, in his words, creates "a very inspiring cultural environment".
For Kalinowsky, the Catalan capital also offers the possibility of meeting new artists, establishing new collaborations, and expanding the horizons of a gallery that, until now, has built its entire career from Lucerne and remained closely linked to artists from the local scene. In a way, it marks another transformation for a space that has not stopped evolving since its founding almost eight years ago.
Crossing borders and expanding horizons
In 2018, when he was just 26, Kalinowsky launched a small space in Lucerne conceived as an informal platform for experimentation around contemporary art, with the idea of creating something more open and flexible than a conventional gallery. It was in 2023 that Kalinowsky began working full-time on KALI, and the space was formally established as a gallery, with a more defined structure, a stable program and an increasingly stronger presence on the international scene, with appearances at international fairs such as Art Rotterdam, ARCOmadrid or miart in Milan.
Beyond its international dimension, KALI Gallery has been building a program marked by the diversity of artistic languages and voices, with special attention to artists linked to the Swiss scene —both young professionals and established ones—, but increasingly open to artists and artistic positions from different backgrounds, from Italy to El Salvador. The gallery currently represents eight artists: Malte Bartsch, Michele Gabriele, Judith Grassl, Sebastian Haas, Krištof Kintera, Nils Nova —whose work is being presented in the Catalan capital—, Jason Rohr and Lulu Cora Süss. Their practices range from painting, sculpture and drawing to video, sound and installation.
More than following a specific curatorial line, KALI focuses on artists who develop their own visual language, experiment with different materials and media and come from diverse cultural contexts. "I am especially interested in the exchange between these different positions and cultural contexts. It is one of the things that I find especially interesting about having a space in Barcelona,” explains Kalinowsky.
In the Catalan capital, however, Kalinowsky does not want to limit himself to simply replicating KALI’s programme in Lucerne. The new headquarters, in fact, should serve to expand the gallery’s program in both directions: bringing new influences and artistic positions from Switzerland and other contexts KALI already works with to Barcelona, and, at the same time, opening up to artists and collaborators from Barcelona and the rest of Spain, creating new dialogues. “The idea is not simply to open a new gallery, but to create a space where these different perspectives can meet and influence each other,” explains Kalinowsky.
A point of connection
Beyond the local scene, among the connections that interest him most is the one between Europe and Latin America, a link for which Barcelona is particularly well positioned, both because of its geographical location and its cultural ties to Latin America. Kalinowsky does not want, however, to turn this relationship into a rigid thematic line that must mark each of the exhibitions, but rather to slowly explore the possibilities that this connection can open up through artists and the collaborations that arise.
The first exhibition with which KALI Gallery presents itself in Barcelona already embodies this connection. To inaugurate its new headquarters at Espai Capellans, Kalinowsky has chosen a monographic exhibition by Nils Nova, born in 1968 in El Salvador and resident in Lucerne since he was twelve. His career has unfolded between these two places, and his own biography embodies this intersection between Latin America and Europe that the gallery wants to explore from Barcelona. But, in addition, the Catalan capital is already familiar to the artist, who has previously exhibited at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies.
But Smoke, Clouds and Elevation goes a step further: in addition to bringing together a new series of paintings, Nova has also designed an installation conceived specifically to engage with the architecture of Espai Capellans and its historic stone walls, turning the building from a mere backdrop into part of the exhibition experience.
In fact, although Kalinowsky had Barcelona on his radar for some time, it wasn’t until he met Espai Capellans that he decided to take the plunge and open a space in the city. He wasn’t looking for a perfectly neutral white cube, an increasingly common model in contemporary gallery spaces, but rather a space with character, capable of challenging artists as well, encouraging them to rethink the relationship between their works and the space that exhibits them. Espai Capellans, which already functioned as a regular exhibition space, offers precisely this: a historic space, with its stone walls still visible, in which architecture does not disappear behind the works, but rather forms part of the exhibition experience.
The exhibition with which the space will be inaugurated on September 12 does not, therefore, feel accidental, but instead reads almost as a statement of intent: that of one of KALI Gallery’s regular artists, but also that of a gallery that wants its arrival in Barcelona to be something more than a change of direction.
KALI Gallery and a moving scene
Espai Capellans is also located a few minutes from Trafalgar, an area that in recent years has increasingly established itself as one of the city’s key hubs for contemporary galleries. More than a dozen spaces are now clustered around its streets, partially shifting the centre of gravity of the city’s gallery scene away from other areas that have traditionally concentrated much of the sector’s activity, such as Consell de Cent. KALI Gallery adds another space to this evolving gallery landscape. It is a scene that has continued to grow and diversify in recent years, with new voices, projects and professionals.
And it does so, moreover, at one of the busiest moments in Barcelona’s art calendar. Just five days after the gallery’s inauguration, from September 17 to 20, Barcelona and L’Hospitalet will host the twelfth edition of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend, bringing together 25 galleries and nearly fifty national and international artists. A particularly significant moment for KALI Gallery to embark on this new chapter in Barcelona, while the city’s art scene continues to gain new voices.