Antoni Tàpies. Collection [5]

The exhibition follow a chronological order from the forties to the present and offer a complete survey of the formal evolution of the Tàpies’s work.

The Fundació presents a new selection of works by Antoni Tàpies from the holdings of the Collection. On this occasion, the selection is displayed in Espais A and B, and includes an overview of different creative stages in Tàpies career, showing the evolution of the typologies, techniques and materials used by the artist. In the exhibition, the artist’s interest in textures and in the expressive value of certain materials – which differ from those commonly used in the academic art world – such as marble dust, sand, soil and others, becomes the most significant characteristic of his work. This interest can be seen in early works like Zoom (1946), in intermediate stages through works such as Earth and Paint (1956) and in works from his mature period, including Brown with Two Papers (1975), Book-Wall (1990), and Matter and Cardboards (2006), to mention just a few.

Tàpies has gradually developed a series of common images, usually taken from everyday life, which turn up at various stages of his artistic production: they include commonplace objects, but also parts of the body that are traditionally considered to be unappealing and that Tàpies incorporates into his work with the aim of showing the value of all things, even those that are plain or poor. The image of the foot takes on particular importance, having been portrayed in different ways, from the iconic representation of the foot to the footprint, the sock and the shoe, and having been a constant throughout different stages of the artist’s career, from his works prior to the matter paintings up until the present. We can find examples in Brown bed (1960), Matter in the Form of a Foot (1965), and Sole of Foot (1984), among others.

The exhibition also highlights Tàpies’ political vocation, which intensified in the sixties and seventies, and is shown here in a 1976 canvas, Composition with Numbers, created in memory of the activist Oriol Solé i Sugranyes, who was shot dead by the Civil Guard after escaping from Segovia prison in April that year. The exhibition also shows the artist’s affinity with music, which he considers to be a very pure medium of expression with great evocative power. From his admiration for the music of Bach, Brahms, and above all Wagner, to his interest in concrete and electronic music. As well as the inclusion here of works that show Tàpies’ interest in music, including Metal Shutter and Violin (1956), and Concert (1985), the Fundació, in conjunction with bcn216, has organised two concerts and one workshop around this subject (see Activities Programme).