Mitjó

Antoni Tàpies

Mitjó

2010

290 x 370 x 125 cm

1887

At the beginning of 1991, during the pre-Olympic fever that engulfed the city of Barcelona, Pere Duran Farell, President of the Board of Trustees of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC),
contacted Antoni Tàpies about the possibility of creating a monumental sculpture for the Museum’s Oval Hall, at the request of Gae Aulenti, the architect of the renovation project for the Palau
National, site of the MNAC.

Tàpies was enthusiastic about the proposal and immediately set to work. Throughout the year, he developed his ideas in a series of sketches. Finally, a small maquette was created that would become known as el mitjó (the Sock).

The project consisted of an 18-metre-high structure in the shape of a sock with holes, stuffed with tangled wires and crossed by iron beams that acted as support. The spectator would be able to enter the sock through one of the torn seams and gain access to a space of silence and reflection. For Tàpies, the idea was to give a cosmic dimension to an insignificant object in a manner that would be rooted in his work while expressing, in the artist’s own words, ‘a desire to give value to small things, akin to the Franciscan and Buddhist ways of thinking’.