Nau Bostik is one of those places that persist. A former adhesive factory wedged between the tracks and the streets of La Sagrera in Barcelona, which has been constantly reinventing itself for ten years thanks to the community that inhabits it. Here urban art is neither decoration nor entertainment: it is social infrastructure, a political gesture, a way to stay alive in a city that often leaves less and less room for spontaneity.
In this context, B-Murals has just unveiled thirteen new murals that redesign the complex, confirming Nau Bostik as a creative organism in constant transformation. The first impact comes immediately from the main facades, entrusted to two artists who speak very distant yet complementary languages: Emilio Cerezo and Martí Sawe.
Cerezo signs an abstract mural that seems to breathe in unison with the building. His rounded, luminous forms, layered like strata of an expanding visual rhythm, turn the facade into an emotional landscape. It is a work born from dialogue with the neighborhood’s residents and celebrates the anniversary of the place with a collective gesture, almost a dawn ritual in which everything vibrates and moves. The same pictorial universe, pushed to the extreme, also enters the interior of the B-Murals gallery with La Rutina del Sueño, an immersive installation that translates into space the suspended instant between sleep and awakening.
On the other side of the complex, Martí Sawe brings a storm. Tempesta Creativa is a mural that tells the story of the chaos of the artistic process: the sudden spark that clashes with bureaucracy, the enthusiasm that stumbles into frustration, the freedom of the gesture that coexists with the trap of self-demand. Sawe mixes the discipline of the illustrator with the spontaneity of the graffiti writer, turning the wall into an ironic yet clear-eyed stage set of the contemporary artist’s condition.
It is in the inner courtyard, however, that the variety of today’s urban scene really explodes. Eight artists selected through an open call, together with special guests and a resident artist, compose a mosaic of styles that shows how this discipline is in constant evolution. There is the experience of Werens and Chylo, the subtle surfaces of Schoko Tanaka, the rural grit of Laura Merayo, the paste-ups by Rockaxson and Vantees, the clean lines of more classic lettering and the illustrated narratives of NSN997 and Andrea Devia Nuño. A courtyard that becomes a geography, crossed by imaginaries coming from Argentina, Italy, Brazil, Japan and from all over Spain.
The entire project was presented during the B-Murals Fest, a day designed to turn urban art into a real meeting place: free workshops, open walls for anyone who wanted to paint, and moments of exchange between artists, curators and institutions. An opportunity to reaffirm that Nau Bostik is not just a cultural venue, but an ecosystem where more than one hundred people work, create, organize activities and share ideas every week.
Ten years after its birth, Nau Bostik continues to demonstrate that there is another way of making culture: from the bottom up, with the community, far from the rhetoric of spectacle-driven events. And the thirteen new works curated by B-Murals are yet another proof that, despite everything, there are still corners of the city where art does more than merely survive: it breathes, grows and multiplies.
