Eugènia Balcells, a Spanish visual artist and a pioneer of experimental cinema and video art in Catalonia and Spain, died March 1, 2026, in Barcelona. She was 82. The cause of death was cancer.
Balcells moved to New York in 1968 and earned an M.A. in Art from the University of Iowa in 1971. She later divided her time between Barcelona and New York, building a conceptual practice that used emerging technology to probe perception and how images are made and received.
Her multichannel installation From the center, created in New York from 1980 to 1982, became an early landmark of video art, noted for its technical ambition and formal innovation.
Decades later, the work reappeared in a major institutional setting as Des del centre, shown in the Sala Oval of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC) as an adaptation of From the center. The installation took the form of a dome that simulated a large eye, extending Balcells’ long-running interest in light, seeing, and circular geometry.
Her work also included MACBA’s 1996 exhibition Seeing the Light, which consisted of two interconnected installations, and FIN (THE END) (1978/2010), now in the Reina Sofía collection, an installation of 100 photographs and an artist’s book critiquing stereotyped portrayals of women in mass-media photo-love stories. Together, works such as From the center and Des del centre helped establish a language for conceptual, technology-forward audiovisual installation in Spain.