Barcelona,
The last show that the Museu Tàpies dedicates to the artist, once his centenary is completed, does not propose a tour of his vertebrate work in stages, but a structured in suggestions.
Imma Prieto and Pablo Allepuz, director and conservative of this center, have devised in “Antoni Tàpies. The imagination of the world” a game of looks in which their images are the starting point to strengthen ties with objects and with other compositions that were part of their particular collection and with which, therefore, he lived and engaged in his work in his work, in addition to archiving documents and literature documents of his first steps.
Therefore, this exhibition is outlined, as a curatorial essay that raises iconographic and historiographic questions: fifty works of Barcelona are associated with a hundred and diverse belongings and testimonies, some closely linked to popular culture, which will also be reviewed and updated while this proposal is prolonged -until January 2026 -, incorporating into the route other pieces from private collections, archives, libraries or markets
The exhibition, which takes its title of a text of the same tàpies in Art and its places (1999), will introduce us in this way in the creations that surrounded this author in his work, in the context of his thinking when his career began, in the images that could feed his. And it makes it possible to review, of course, the weight in his work of the surrealist inheritance, of his interest in the mystique or in the thought of Ramón Llull, especially by the method of knowledge to which he called ars combinatorial: A mechanism of geometric figures and symbols that combine letters and concepts, and was announced as a new knowledge with universal claims. Its use, based on the possibility of unity of the different study disciplines of their time, had to conduct, through reason, demonstration and dialogue, to peace between religions, to belief in a great network in which the world, man and God were involved.
Just in that volume we were talking about, Art and its placesTàpies reflected on what their personal funds had of intercultural and interdisciplinary from an autobiographical perspective, but also criticism. Even commissary. And completed his words with images that he did not hierarchized. Those works that accompanied him had, as we said, a relevant imprint in his first stage, since the mid -forties in the mid -fifty: just before his abstract journey.
In the first area, the sample recalls the existing duality in those beginnings of Tàpies between academicism, identified with realism, and the avant -garde. Together with three almost hyperrealist portraits, dedicated to Josep Lluís Samaranch, his beloved Teresa and Joan Brossa, we will contemplate unpublished librettas of academic studies and drawings, but also broad documentation on prehistory and primitive art and children’s drawings that testify to new narratives.
As soon as in 1948 it was Tàpies one of the founders of the Dau Group to the SET; It was the time when, to a large extent under the impulse of Dubuffet, the visual production of childhood was understood as a rich and free exercise of formulas, and cave painting, as a universal prelinguistic element in which magic did not refuse.
We will also see pieces of Catalan that raise the body as a landscape and the landscape as a body: great images with physicities away from the norm and in transformation, linked to nature and the telluric forces, embodied these as hands that become roots due to magnetic currents. Both invite us to look at the world from another place, to adopt other possible perspectives of ourselves and the environment.
The references of thought common to other artists of their fifth (such as psychoanalysis) are also alluded to, as well as the entertainment forms that were close to it: cinema, magazines, chromos, letters of Tarot, the Tibidabo Park. A Mural presentation Cartography Invitations to private cultural activities organized by Club 49, heir to the Adlan movement of the Second Republic, to which Tàpies joined.
Certain works, mostly portraits, point to the subsequent development of their work, such as the beginning of informal paintings; others refer to their love for poor and close materials, such as object painting Capted Taula (TURNED TABLE)where it seems to return to the experimentation of its beginnings.
“Antoni Tàpies. The imagination of the world”
Museu Tàpies
Carrer d’Aragó, 255
Barcelona
From February 13 from 2024 to January 21, 2026
