100 years of Antoni Tapies

The Tàpies Foundation starts the artist’s centenary in a new direction: Emma BritoA curator, researcher, and writer, he won the international competition to manage the art center for the next five years. Prieto, who believes that it is necessary to rethink Tàpies from the present and, at the same time, think about the present of Tàpies, wants to show above all the essayist side of the artist, who has always worked from openness, dialogue and critical criticism. behavior . “For me, Tápies is more valid today than he was in his time, and it is necessary to bring Tápies back to the table in domestic and international discussions,” Brito explained a few days ago in an interview with Joan Bordeus in clouds.

The year of Tàpies began yesterday, December 13, the day the artist would have celebrated his centenary. In addition to opening doors with works and artistic performances, the Foundation opened two exhibitions: Tapis, Zen imprint I A=A, B=B. First, sponsored Nouria Homsfocuses on Tàpies’ interest in the creations of some Japanese monks who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed the scope of the traditional values ​​of Zen Buddhism and critiqued the prevailing artistic culture and traditions.

The aim of the exhibition is to show the influence of these artists’ attitudes, images and techniques on the Tapi language. Homs confirms that the impact did not come in the form of a direct copy, but rather in the form of an integration of “the method of working and understanding the creative act.” The works of Zen monks are characterized by their critical spirit, often accompanied by humor, and also by the active role they offer the viewer. The exhibition, which includes some fifteen unpublished works, shows how Tabi on several occasions adopted this way of making art and referred to themes characteristic of Zen Buddhism such as the passage of time, the inevitability of change or the interconnectedness of all things.

The works on display demonstrate the immediacy and spontaneity that Tàpies has with his creativity. In fact, the Zen monks themselves, who wanted to reduce the weight of intellectual analysis in the artistic field, advocated working directly with the work, without the interference of thought. They are pieces that repeatedly use paper and ink, with brush strokes reminiscent of Japanese writing. In fact, Homs has included in one of the rooms a showcase of the works of Zen monks so that we can directly observe the ideograms and drawings that have left their mark on Tápies’s work – and we must also take into account, other artists of the moment such as John Cage, Robert Motherwell s Jackson Pollock.

second exhibition, A=A, B=Bpart of the book The new vision of the world (1954), a collection of lectures given by various experts in the fields of science and philosophy in the 1950s in Switzerland that served as inspiration for many of Tàpies’s works. Material or physical Pep VidalThe curator has updated these texts through the works of artists such as Nimesh Ramesh Shahari, Irene Sola s John Baldessarireflects on the relationships between science, humans, and art 70 years after the book’s publication.

The works in this exhibition are distributed in two halls, organized as if they were a scientific article. There is even a space dedicated to the references the artists used to visualize the pieces. The first room considers classical concepts of science such as time, measurement, or error, and the second room focuses on science as an explanation of what is beyond us and beyond our comprehension. In general, Vidal invites us to think about the different ways of looking at and understanding the world, which Tàpies, with his global vision of artistic and scientific fields, used when creating.

Irene Sola, for example, explores the act of trust that must be undertaken in order to access another person’s truth through a video in which she records for several minutes her London flatmate thinking – silently, with her eyes closed – about his house in London. Canada. The work that will certainly attract the most attention, even though it may not seem so at first, is work Violeta Mayoral, which installs two almost invisible wires that run from the floor to the ceiling of the room and must be constantly monitored to prevent visitors from tripping on them. It is a piece that will make us rethink the space that objects occupy beyond their physical size and will change the way we understand our bodies’ relationship with the environment.

Parallel to the exhibition A=A, B=B, Vidal has organized four case studies with UAB physics students who will analyze the exhibited pieces from a scientific point of view. This procedure gives the continuity of the reflection line in the sample: Zaira Amelborough, Emma Bitran I Francesc BushalWith their analyses, they embody the idea of ​​the transmission of scientific knowledge over time, while questioning to what extent the ways of thinking about science and art seventy years ago are still valid.

In addition to these two exhibitions, the centenary will be celebrated in the coming months with multidisciplinary activities that will bring us closer to the creative world of Tàpies. The foundation asked the director to produce a film about Tàpies Albert Serra, convenes a critical writing competition targeting ESO and baccalaureate students, launches a mobile library to promote literature and connect it to other artistic disciplines and establishes the Anthony Tapis Chair. According to Prieto, the most notable activity of the Tàpies year will be the retrospective, which will allow to see pieces by the artist from July that have so far only been seen in books. “If the time has come to rediscover Tàpies, this exhibition will allow it,” says the new director of the foundation.