Tàpies: From Within

The Fundació Antoni Tàpies and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya are jointly presenting an exhibition that will be held at the same time in the galleries of both institutions. Tàpies: From Within has been conceived exclusively from the works conserved in the artist’s house and at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, and follows two different lines of work: on one hand, the large mural compositions, on the other, the everyday objects and “poor” materials.

At the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya the development of the mural paintings will be presented through a show that covers his entire artistic output, from the mid 1940s to 2011, from the pastiness and thickness of the paint in the early years to the experimentation with new materials, like varnish, latex and sheet metal, of the following decades. The exhibition clearly shows Tàpies’ constant interest in matter with two different but complementary approaches: as a rejection of traditional artistic language and as a synonym of change and transformation.

At the Fundació Antoni Tàpies the selection centres on a series of works from 1946 to 2009 that highlight Tàpies’ interest in “poor” materials and objects: from the use of cardboard, thread and string of the early works, to the assembly and the incorporation of the object on the surface of the canvas that became more evident from the late 1960s. The selection reveals Tàpies’ wish to magnify what is considered small and insignificant in order to show that anything thought of as marginal can suggest essential ideas.