Antoni Tàpies. The Collection, # 3

The Fundació presents a new selection of works by Antoni Tàpies belonging to the Collection. The show, displayed on this occasion in Spaces A and B, includes different moments in the artist’s creative career from the 1940s to the present, and illustrates the evolution of his typologies, techniques and materials.

The visit begins with a selection of earlier works in which two opposing procedures can be seen: on the one hand, the interest in extra-pictorial materials and the density of matter, noticeable in the works of 1946 and 1947 such as Zoom (1964) and Newspaper Cross (1946-7); on the other, the tendency towards surrealism, which in the case of Tàpies suggests influences of Joan Miró, Paul Klee and Max Ernst, visible in works such as Parafaragamus (1949) or the series of drawings Natural History Series (1950-1951). Tàpies reaches the stage of maturity in the biennium 1954-1955 with works that recover the initial interest in matter and its stages of formation and deformation, the so called matter paintings, works such as Large Matter with Lateral Papers (1963) and Grey, Orange and Pink (1967), among others. The exhibition also features works from the end of the 1960s and 1970s, in which, on the one hand, the artist incorporates the object – appreciable in works such as Chair and Clothes (1970) and Wood and Windows (1976) -, and, on the other, expresses its political vocation, visible on a canvas of 1976 created in memory of the activist Oriol Solé i Sugranyes, killed by the Guardia Civil after he fled the prison in Segovia in April of that year (Composition with Numbers). The exhibition continues with works from the 1980s, characterized by the general use of varnish (Evil Painters, 1988, a work that refers to the writer, philosopher, mystic and theologian of the thirteenth century Majorcan Ramon Llull; Diptych in Varnish, 1984) and the use of refractory clay (Trainer, 1986; Block with signs, 1988; Heap of Earth, 1989), and closes with a sample of recent pieces which confirms the interest of Tàpies in the images of everyday environment (Two Chairs, 2009) and by the nature of art (Land of Shadow I, 1988).

The visit ends with the screening of the documentary Tàpies (1969), by Clovis Prévost, produced by Maeght, Paris, projected in the Auditorium of the Fundació (Space C).