This mural by the artist Manuel Barbadillo was inaugurated at the end of 1982. It is an excellent example of the geometric abstraction of the second half of the twentieth century in Spain. It is located on the main facade of the Milan apartment building, on the street parallel to the N-340. The mural is part of the initiative that the Fuengirola City Council had to intervene in the urban center in order to bring contemporary art closer to the street, making it everyday. On the urban level, this intervention tries to balance the tensions produced in the fabric of the city as a result of its rapid growth. Despite the quality of the works on display, this small "museum on the street" is one of the lesser-known cultural proposals on the Costa del Sol.
Fuengirola takes advantage of being the first city in the world with an outdoor painting museum. The initiative, which is part of a Special Plan of Ornament and Open Museum of the City, which included the slogan "For an Urban Art". The objective in question was the treatment of the medians produced by the construction of new higher-rise buildings adjacent to the old low houses, thinking of covering these blind median cloths with significant contemporary artists, thus avoiding the deterioration that was occurring in the urban landscape.
Being all the middle houses of private property, it was an indispensable condition the authorization of the owners of the wall where the painting was hung, and therefore the temporary transfer of the right to fly of the adjoining property, which would never lose in any way its right to build what the General Urban Planning Plan that existed at that time allowed.
These murals were painted on 125 x 125 cm. flat fiber cement plates, and could be disassembled and taken to another place at any time afterwards. The aforementioned plates are screwed to a metal structure fixed in turn to the wall.
The panels were required to be painted with mineral paints based on silicates and acrylates, which thus fulfill the double function and resistance and inalterability of colors.
The city lives with this Open-air Museum an experience of plastic coexistence with the aforementioned works of art, being daily the effect of seeing and admiring them.
https://n-340.org/patrimonio/items-patrimoniales/malaga/fuengirola/museo-abierto/mural-de-barbadillo/