“La forma del silencio” at Galería Victor Lope, Barcelona: Six Painters Rethink the Landscape

Is a landscape painting a picture of a place, or a picture of the person looking at it? La forma del silencio (The Shape of Silence) at Galería Victor Lope, Barcelona puts that old question to six contemporary painters. The group exhibition opens on 12 November 2026 in the Eixample and runs until 6 February 2027, bringing together Clara Adolphs, Gerard Castellví, Léo Dorfner, Malgosia Jankowska, Stefan Peters and Ramon Surinyac.

Landscape as inquiry, not inventory

The gallery frames the show around a clear premise: landscape here is a territory for artistic investigation, memory and emotion rather than a faithful record of nature. In the gallery’s own phrase, “the landscape is shaped by the perspective of the observer.” Some works are figurative and others abstract; some move between what was seen and what was imagined. In one painting the landscape functions as a memory, in another as a surviving fragment, a terrain to explore, or a composition in which the act of painting matters more than the view.

That variety is the point. Rather than a single style, the exhibition offers six distinct answers to the same prompt, which is what makes a good group show more than the sum of its walls.

Six painters, six languages

Clara Adolphs, born in Sydney in 1985, paints from old, abandoned photographs. Her muted tones and visible strokes, laid down with palette knives, give forgotten images a second life — landscape as found memory.

Stefan Peters, born in 1978 and based in Hasselt, Belgium, trained at the MAD Faculty in Genk and the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. His Vistas series is built from colour gradients on smoothed wooden panels: the horizon reduced to a transition of hue, landscape at its most distilled.

Malgosia Jankowska, born in Sochaczew, Poland, in 1978 and now based in Berlin, studied painting in Warsaw and at the University of the Arts in Berlin. She works in watercolour and Chinese ink — media in which water does half the work, and which bring the show a lightness and transparency different from oil on canvas.

Léo Dorfner, born in Paris in 1985, moves between painting and works on paper, with a strong graphic and drawn component in his practice.

Ramon Surinyac, born in Manlleu in 1974 and a Fine Arts graduate specialising in painting, contributes compositions built on white alongside mountain scenes; his On white II is the exhibition’s cover image. Gerard Castellví completes the line-up; for details of his practice, check with the gallery.

Galería Victor Lope in the Eixample

Victor Lope Arte Contemporáneo is on Carrer Aribau, in the grid of the Eixample that holds much of Barcelona’s commercial gallery scene. This exhibition mixes Catalan painters with artists born in Australia, Belgium, Poland and France. Running across the winter holidays and into February, the show offers a long window for visitors.

Why it matters for collectors and painters

For collectors, a group exhibition of this kind is an efficient way to compare several painters working in different media — oil, panel, watercolour and ink — within one coherent theme. It is also a reminder that landscape, often dismissed as conservative, remains one of the most active genres in contemporary painting.

For painters, the value lies in comparison. Seeing Adolphs’s palette-knife reconstructions of photographs beside Peters’s gradients and Jankowska’s washes shows how far the same subject can be pushed: from narrative and nostalgia to almost pure colour. The exhibition’s closing question — whether what we see reflects reality or our own reading of it — is one every landscape painter has to answer in the studio.

Visiting information

Galería Victor Lope, Carrer Aribau 75, 08036 Barcelona. 12 November 2026 – 6 February 2027. Open Monday 15:00–19:00, Tuesday–Friday 11:00–14:00 and 15:00–19:00, Saturday 11:00–14:00. Opening reception details: check with the gallery. Tel. +34 936 675 559, [email protected]. See the gallery’s exhibition page, our La forma del silencio Barcelona listing, and more openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.