The happy coincidence of the centenary of the birth of Antoni Tàpies and the desire of the foundation that bears his name to take advantage of the anniversary to vindicate its validity and modernity with the semester of Spanish presidency of the Council of the EU, when it is tradition that the country in power present a major exhibition in Brussels, have come together to bring to the community capital the largest retrospective of the last 20 years of the Catalan creator and thinker.
The exhibition, curated by Manuel Borja-Villel, opened yesterday at the Bozar art center and in 2024 it will travel to Madrid and Barcelona as part of the celebrations of the Tàpies year, which starts on December 13. The project will take different forms in each of the scenarios in which it is deployed, but it has the clear vocation of breaking down walls, of freeing the artist from the labels and categories to which he has been reduced and that could explain the oblivion in which - everyone recognizes it - has fallen in recent years.
“The explanation of Tàpies' painting through its material aspect” has ended up “transforming into a straitjacket,” states Borja-Villel and former director of the Foundation, one of the greatest experts on the art, in the exhibition catalogue. work of the artist, who believes that he may have been harmed by the current lack of interest in Europe and the United States in informalist art because, after being something groundbreaking and spontaneous, it has ended up becoming something normative.
The order of the exhibition – which brings together 120 works, many of them from private collections that had been out of the public eye for years or that had not traveled since they were acquired by international museums – is chronological, but the visitor should not be fooled. What awaits him is “a total questioning of the classical historiography with which he has been defined,” explains the director of the Antoni Tàpies Foundation, Imma Prieto, who has organized the retrospective with the Reina Sofía and the Bozar.
The first two rooms are dominated by self-portraits – figurative, even classical, but introspective – and reach the beginning of the 1950s, the most influential period of Picasso, Miró and the Surrealists, until their departure from the Dau al Set group. Born in 1923, at the age of 18, tuberculosis left him bedridden for three years, locked within four walls. It was at that time when he began to develop his artistic vocation. Already at that early stage, a taste for mysticism and spirituality can be seen that reappears recurrently throughout his entire career, in late works such as Celebració de la mel (1989).
In 1953, the artist's work takes a clear turn and enters its purely material stage. In the following rooms the visitor moves between a parade of paintings created from old clothes, sheets, rags, human footprints with materials that are sometimes fragile and often far from being classified as noble, and representations of the ugly, the eschatological. It is the Tàpies best known to the general public. The canvas Cos de matèria i taques taronges (1968), which represents a man defecating, has been chosen for the poster of the retrospective, which is titled The Practice of Art, taken from the compilation of writings of the artist and thinker.
There is also no shortage of wall paintings, a constant that the artist uses literally, as an expressive format, evocative of his surname, but also metaphorically. The wall is the room where he was imprisoned as a young man, but also the Spain of the time, enclosed within the walls of the Franco dictatorship. The exhibition wants to demonstrate how, despite appearances, Tàpies' work is a very homogeneous and circular work, although in each era it represents his themes in a different way, for example his social and political positioning.
Although this preoccupation is often placed in the seventies, it is actually appreciated throughout his career, from early works such as Triptych (1948) and Homage to Federico García Lorca (1951) to Blue with four red bars (1966), in addition to Caixa de la camisa roja (1972), which evokes the shooting of Lluís Companys, from Paris from a private collection, In memory of Salvador Puig (1974), or Dukkha (1995), the Buddhist term that evokes personal dejection in which historical events such as the fall of the USSR and the war in Bosnia were included.
After exploring the artist's guts and reaching his last days, the retrospective takes a poetic turn and ends with a series of 50 drawings defined as a long love letter between the artist and his other half, as he often referred to his woman, Teresa, a figurative self-portrait of all its symbology, page by page. who has rarely left her house. It is not easy to distill the essence of an author to whom some 9,000 works are attributed, but “this is the retrospective that Borja-Villel wanted to do,” says his collaborator, Rafael García.
