The largest retrospective dedicated to Antoni Tàpies opens its doors. Not in Barcelona, where a selection of 120 works, mostly international loans, will arrive in July at the smaller Fundació Tàpies, but in Madrid. At the Reina Sofía Museum. No less than 220 pieces that range from the most intimate to the monumental and the political. From the body, sex and eschatology to spirituality, physical decay and war. Works full of crosses, scissors and words written backwards from half the world, including pieces that have barely appeared like the pregnant Great Black Relief from the Dallas Meadows. Pieces chosen by Manuel Borja-Villel, a student of the artist's work and first director of his foundation, who, by tearing down partitions, has created large rooms to create environments, contexts in which the works dialogue as they did while the artist created them in the studio of Campins.
Environments like the initial surrealism of Dau al Set, with dreamlike, geometric and demonic paintings, influenced by Klee, Ernst or Miró, in which they are even painted androgynous, with breasts, fluid, and with symbols that will not disappear like the cross. And with strong political and spiritual concern, as in the drawings from the Natural History series. Almost nightmarish drawings with bishops on horseback, exploiting capitalists and bloodthirsty kings that go from the origin of the world to industrialism, revolt and fascism. Made in Paris in 1950, they responded to the “purely biological-magical” explanation that Ernst gave us about nature. He added, he said, the class struggle and that “history abandoned to its natural and passive development is catastrophic for man if the intervention of an active, creative element, facing the future, is excluded from it.”
A thinker who immediately moved on to his well-known material paintings, to work with paintings as walls, walls, in which he made incisions, marks, and to achieve enormous international projection, from the Guggenheim to the Documenta in Kassel in 1964, for which he created three enormous works that the exhibition has brought together. An exhibition that does not leave aside the most intimate Tàpies, such as the drawings dedicated to his wife Teresa Barba and in which there are everything from domestic objects to an erect penis. The stage in which he abandons the material and paints with varnish stars in a spectacular room with true haikus, paintings with Hindu upanishads and a woman open with her legs in front of a black cross that fascinated Louise Bourgeois. There are also rooms of his political militancy – paintings about Puig Antich or the Assembly of Catalonia – and his concern for physical decline and the war in Yugoslavia that he experienced while receiving the Golden Lion of Venice in 1993.
For Borja-Villel, the concerns that crossed his work are those of current art: “He is a painter of the present, extraordinary, a painter-painter.” He exemplifies this in front of Bathtub, painted in 2005, seven years before he died. On the surface of that bathtub drawn in ocher material, some black lines seem like glimpses of lean legs. Or mountains. Where the head of the legs would be there is a cross, a T, which symbolizes the painter, in the middle of a cloud of scribbles, an allusion to the artist's melancholy. Tàpies is 82 years old and, says Borja-Villel, “he puts himself in the bathtub, a place where you have no pain, where he is almost falling apart.”
“They asked him obsessively,” he concludes, “if it was figurative or abstract. His painting is on another level, it is both. He always talked about how matter thinks, that there is no separation between humans and non-humans. Here he is represented, but those legs are the mountains that he sees near Campins. Or a wave. There is no separation, and that is very current. Then there is the spiritual element that today all indigenous, Afro-descendant, and queer movements have, an element of process, transformation, mutation of bodies, which interests them until the end, concerned with the movement, with what is life that goes beyond , because we know that we will end up being a piece of a wave or a tree.”
