"We must be able to think about today's world through and from the work of Tàpies." This is how Imma Prieto (Vilafranca del Penedès, 1976) summarizes the yearning for the departure on which the new stage of the Barcelona center will pivot, which she has just joined as director when there are just a few months left before the commemorative events for the artist's centenary begin. . The curator, researcher and writer, who for the last four years has directed Es Baluard Museu d'Art Contemporani de Palma, has just landed, and she does so with clear ideas, using her knowledge but also her imagination and creativity , with enthusiasm and courage, accepting that art is a path of experimentation, that it is worth taking risks and that mistakes can be opportunities. In any case, she assures, "a museum or an art center today must be a space that generates knowledge and activates the critical spirit."
"Tàpies is one of the most important artists of the second half of the 20th century, the artist par excellence," he believes, and, above all, "he is more relevant than ever." For the director, this was precisely the first surprise she received when she visited last September the major retrospective dedicated to her by the Bozar center in Brussels, curated by Manuel Borja-Villel, which in 2024 will travel to the Reina Sofía in an expanded and It will later stop in Barcelona (starting on July 17). Because the centenary, she believes, "should not so much be the time to pay homage to the past, but rather the way to open ourselves to the future, to look forward, to see what we are leaving behind and what needs to be opened." ".
Prieto understands the legacy of Tàpies as an "essayistic writing" that must guide in the construction of that future that must necessarily be permeable, where all disciplines and knowledge are filtered, and in which "excellence and internationalization, which does not mean that we bring foreign artists, but that we are a reference abroad in the way of showing Tàpies and above all returning it to the center of international debates, that it has recognition and an echo outside our borders" .
Despite the fact that he joined a few weeks ago - "which seems like years", according to the president of the Fundació Ferran Rodés - and that the Tàpies Year program, Prieto has already had time to incorporate some new features that try to link the center with the academic world, such as the creation of the Antoni Tàpies Chair in complicity with the Pompeu Fabra University, on whose campus the artist consecrated a secular chapel, a space for agnostic worship unique in the world; the establishment of a critical writing contest aimed at primary and secondary school students that will be named after Teresa Barba, the creator's wife; o the Institute of Critical Drifts, a space for reflection in which a group of researchers (Manuel Borja-Villel, Daniel G. Andújar, Andrea Soto, Mabel Tapia and Prieto herself, among others), will meet periodically with the aim to articulate new interpretations and readings. Likewise, an international research award will be created.
Regarding the Tàpies Year exhibition program, which was presented before his appointment and has as its motto Tàpies lives. Vive Tàpies, the new director has incorporated a new exhibition by the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, Threads of memory, which will replace the announced Sengai, about the work of the Japanese Buddhist monk whom Tàpies admired and cited in some of his works and writings ( has fallen due to budgetary problems) and instead of the lighting intervention on the façade that Antoni Arola's studio planned, it will be the Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey who will provide Lluís Domènech i Montaner's building with a second skin composed of waste and material from waste that you find near your house. The intervention will be carried out with the collaboration of Fine Art students or with the migrant community and proposes a double reflection. On the one hand, a call to attention to the degradation of the environment (Africa is one of Europe's garbage dumps) and, on the other, "to symbolically remember, without the intention of accusing anyone, that part of modernism was financed with traffic of slaves".
