In 1998, the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida was commissioned to carry out a public intervention for MACBA, which had opened to the public three years earlier. Chillida visited the area and, while studying its characteristics, detected that the space had a weak point that hindered the integration of Richard Meier´s building with the rest of the Raval neighbourhood: namely, the concrete wall that separates Plaça dels Àngels from carrer Joaquim Costa. This is where the artist decided he would site his large ceramic mural that acts as a uniting element, a permeable border and a vanishing point that draws our gaze.

After making many preparatory drawings, Chillida had the mural produced in the workshop of his friend and frequent collaborator, the German ceramist Hans Spinner, who worked in Grasse, in the south of France. Using the oxidized ceramic technique, they fired the concrete slabs at 1,300 degrees, then painted them with copper oxide and fired them again at 1,120 degrees. This double firing process gave the painted surface its characteristic black colour, while conferring on the whole a texture that is halfway between sculpture and printmaking.

Comprising 416 separate pieces, the mural hovers three meters above the ground and rises with forcefulness and elegance, playing with the modulation between full and empty, black and white, and abstraction and graphics.

Chillida always supported the idea of public works as a strategy that made art available to everyone. And he worked doggedly to integrate sculpture into the surroundings. This piece, his Barcelona, Mural G-333, is now an intrinsic part of the landscape of both the Raval and the city. Since 2014, it has shared the wall with another emblematic mural belonging to our urban landscape: the reconstruction of Together We Can Stop AIDS by Keith Haring, also belonging to the MACBA Collection.