Tàpies’ Year | Activity | MACBA Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona
Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, 1923-2012) began his artistic endeavors in his teens. The growing dedication to drawing and painting prompted him to abandon his university studies in Law. In the 1940s he began to exhibit his works, with a marked personality, and together with Joan Ponç, Joan Brossa and others, he founded the avant-garde magazine Give to Seven (1948). Although Tàpies’ painting showed the influence of Miró and Klee, he soon added iconography, magical themes, geometries and color studies that would lead to material painting. Following the Second World War and the launch of the atomic bomb, which swept away artists on both sides of the Atlantic, Antoni Tàpies began to express a special interest in matter, earth, dust, atoms and particles . This tendency results in the use of materials unrelated to academic plastic expression, such as shoes or socks, and in the experimentation of new techniques. With fabrics of intense texture and great expressive possibilities, in the mid-fifties, Tàpies achieved international recognition as one of the great innovators of informalism. Material paintings form a substantial part of Tàpies’ work, for whom matter was also magic, mimesis and alchemy. Apart from his artistic activity, which he did not conceive of as detached from the reality of life, Antoni Tàpies always maintained a firm moral commitment towards political and social events. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, his involvement against Franco intensified and his works took on a marked character of denunciation. Also at this time, coinciding with the emergence of arte povera in Europe and post-minimalism in the United States, Tàpies accentuated his work with objects by incorporating them into his language. In the following years and until the end of his life, Eastern culture was fundamental in the artist’s production, with a renewed emphasis on matter, on the identity of man-nature and on the denial of any dualism. The works of recent years contain a physical and spiritual reflection. Tàpies was an intellectual with a great reading and musical background. He carried out an intense activity in the field of graphic work with bibliophile books and folders in collaboration with poets and writers such as Alberti, Bonnefoy, Du Bouchet, Brodsky, Brossa, Daive, Dupin, Foix, Frémon, Gimferrer , Guillén, Jabès, Mestres Quadreny, Mitscherlich, Paz, Saramago, Takiguchi, Ullán, Valente and Zambrano, among others. Parallel to his artistic activity, Antoni Tàpies developed a prolific work as a writer. Among his publications, stand out: The practice of art (1970), Art against aesthetics (1974), Personal memory (1977), Reality as art (1982), For a modern and progressive art (1985), Value of art (1993) and Art and its places (1999). In 1984, to promote the study of contemporary art and its dissemination, Antoni Tàpies created the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, based in the old publishing house Muntaner i Simón, on Carrer Aragó in Barcelona’s Eixample. Tàpies’ work has been exhibited in the most prominent international institutions and has received multiple awards and public recognition. Among many others, it has been exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1962), the Kunsthaus in Zurich (1962), the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (1965), the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1973), at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1974), at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (1990), at the Valencian Institute of Modern Art in Valencia (1992), at Museum of Modern Art in New York (1992), at the Jeu de Paume in Paris (1994) and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona (2004).
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