Opening: Thursday, 22 October at 7 pm
An exhibition by Michael Lawton and the pupils at the Escola dels Encants that is part of the espais c programme (‘Spaces for artistic creation in primary schools’). Espais c is an initiative of the Barcelona Education Consortium and the Barcelona Institute of Culture that fosters dialogue between artistic practice and the public sphere of primary education through long-term coexistence processes.
Ice creams that live in a forest, explosions of colour, palaces filled with joy and sadness, mysterious red-tinged islands, trapped lions, aeroplane dogs, angry planets…
A world of fantasy arising from collaboration between primary school students at the Escola dels Encants and the artist-writer Michael Lawton. During the 2024-25 and 2025-26 academic years, Lawton moved his studio to a classroom at the school and invited the educational community to explore his artistic imagination.
In this unique back-to-school experience, Lawton’s workshop has turned into a world of its own, where the protagonists – the children, teachers and the artist – swap roles, question certainties and unlearn ways of creating. When hands are busy, conversations flow, learning moves in multiple directions, as art emerges in the most unexpected situations.
Story Told, Painting Finished begins with literature, shifts towards painting and culminates in a collective artwork that combines visual elements with oral storytelling.
The project uses some of the children’s favourite books as a starting point, as the group of painters build on this foundation to create a series of individual artworks. When these paintings are randomly combined and distributed to a new group, they are stripped of their literary references and become the starting point for twelve entirely new stories that are collaboratively written by twelve pairs of young writers.
These narratives, recounted in the authors’ own voices, drift aimlessly through the exhibition space around twelve clouds of paintings, waiting for us to discover the invisible connections that unite them. From the sidelines, Michael’s artworks observe this process as they quietly tell their own stories.
