The happy coincidence of the centenary of the birth of Antoni Tàpies and the desire of the foundation that bears his name to take advantage of the occasion to claim its validity and modernity with the semester of the Spanish presidency of the Council of the EU, when it is tradition that the country in turn presents a great exhibition in Brussels, have come together to bring to the community capital the largest retrospective of the last 20 years of the Catalan creator.
The exhibition, curated by Manuel Borja-Villel, opened yesterday at the Bozar art center and in 2024 will go to Madrid and Barcelona as part of the Tàpies year celebrations, which begins on December 13. The project will take different forms in each scenario, but it has a clear vocation to break down walls, to free the artist from the labels and categories to which he has been reduced and which could explain the oblivion into which he has fallen in recent years .
“The explanation of Tàpies’ painting through the material aspect” has ended up “transforming into a straitjacket”, says Borja-Villel, one of the great connoisseurs of the work of the artist, who believes that he may have been harmed by the current lack of interest in Europe and the United States for informalist art, turned into something normative.
The order of the exhibition – which brings together 120 works, many of which come from private collections that have been out of the public eye for years or that have not traveled since they were acquired by international museums – is chronological, but the visitor should not be deceived. What awaits him is “a total questioning of the classical historiography with which it has been defined”, explains Imma Prieto, the director of the Antoni Tàpies Foundation, which has organized the retrospective with the Reina Sofia and the Bozar.
The first two rooms are dominated by self-portraits – figurative, classic even, but at the same time introspective – and reach the beginning of the fifties, the period of greatest influence by Picasso, Miró and the Surrealists, until the departure of the group Give to Seven Born in 1923, at the age of 18 tuberculosis left him bedridden for three years, confined between four walls. It was at that time when he began to develop his artistic vocation. Already at that early stage, a taste for mysticism and spirituality can be seen that reappears repeatedly throughout his career, in works such as Celebració de la mel (1989).
In 1953 the artist’s work takes a clear turn and enters the purely material stage, and in the following rooms the visitor moves between a parade of paintings created from old clothes, sheets, cloths, human prints with materials sometimes fragile and often far from the qualification of nobles, and representations of what is ugly, eschatological. It is the Tàpies best known to the general public. The canvas Body of matter and orange stains (1968), which represents a man defecating, has been chosen for the poster of the retrospective, which is entitled The practice of art, taken from the collection of writings of the artist and thinker.
There is also no lack of wall paintings, a constant that the artist uses literally, as an expressive format, evocative of his surname, but also metaphorically. The wall is the room where he was locked up as a young man, but also the Spain of the time, enclosed within the walls of the Franco dictatorship. The exhibition wants to show that, despite appearances, Tàpies’ work is very homogeneous and circular, even if in each period he represents the themes differently, for example, his social and political thought.
Although this preoccupation is often located in the seventies, it is actually appreciated throughout his career, from early works such as Triptych (1948) and Homage to Federico García Lorca (1951) to works such as Blue with four barres roges (1966), in addition to Caixa de la camisa roja (1972), which evokes the shooting of Lluís Companys, from Paris from a private collection, In memory of Salvador Puig (1974), or Dukkha (1995), the Buddhist term with which he evokes the personal dejection he plunged into in the face of events such as the fall of the USSR and the Bosnian war.
After going through the guts of the artist and reaching his last days, the retrospective takes a poetic turn and ends with a series of 50 drawings that are a long love letter between the artist and his other half , as he often referred to his wife, Teresa, a figurative self-portrait who rarely left her home. It is not easy to distill the essence of the author of 9,000 works, but “this is the retrospective that Borja-Villel wanted to do”, says his collaborator, Rafael García.
