Madrid. The Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies used to have in a workshop numerous objects that he was collecting, which sometimes served to incorporate into a picture or sculpture, or simply as a source of inspiration. The Tàpies Museum in Barcelona inaugurated the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: the imagination of the world, in which the work of the Catalan artist with those objects that jointly built a novel and unique imaginary.
In the exhibition they are traveled through 50 works and more than a hundred objects those hidden corners of the creative process of Tàpies, which he revealed in an essay with the same title, The imagination of the world, included in the volume Art and its places (1999), in which he also delves into the visual context that surrounded him and how he talked with his work, through a game of looks between his pieces, images and objects of his collection and a wide selection of archive documents and bibliographic.
The exhibition, which had the curatorship of Imma Prieto and Pablo Allepuz, director and conservative of the area of the Museu Tàpies collection, respectively, seeks to relate in a diaphanous way the imaginary and the visual context that the artist evokes through his work with images and personal objects that he collected and with which he lived and dialogued. Also, with archival and bibliographic documents of its first creative years, which include elements of popular culture.
As explained by Imma Prieto, director of the museum, After a centenary in which we have been able to enjoy one of the most important exhibitions about the artist, we had to return to the origin and ask us questions and ask them to the legacy with the purpose of opening new dialogues, and taking into account the clues that Tàpies left in his writings, both essays and biographical. Think of a broad sense the surrealist inheritance
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The other curator, Pablo Allepuz, explained that it is A position positioned between the autobiographical and the historical, between the criticism and the police station, in which the written discourse is accompanied by a careful selection of images that are organized following a non -hierarchical line
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The exhibition brings us closer to the duality existing at the beginning of the artist’s trajectory between academicism-realism and the avant-garde. Hence, three portraits are shown near hyperrealism signed by Tàpies: Portrait by Josep Lluís Samaranch (1951); Portrait of Teresa (1953) y Joan Brossa portrait (1950-1970), which are presented together with unpublished books of studies and academic drawings from 1943 to 1944, and other materials of the time, such as a copy of the magazine From here and there, The extraordinary Christmas number of 1934.
In another section of the exhibition, tàpies works on the body are shown as a landscape and vice versa. These are large images with non -regulatory bodies in transformation in relation to nature and telluric forces, such as hands that become roots due to magnetic, animals or natural currents, as the mesmerism pointed out or as Edgar Allan Poe collected in some of his stories. Images that invite you to look at the world with new perspectives
Prieto detailed.
It also includes a selection of works that point to the subsequent development of their work, such as the beginning of the matrical paintings, when the artist stood as one of the most prominent representatives of informalism. In the 70s, his works already included poor and material objects in their immediate surroundings, such as painting on object Table turned upon (tired table).
Thinking about the corpus of images that inhabit and surround its artistic creation brings us to an infinite and unbeatable cosmogony. Thinking about the cosmos goes hand in hand with human life, ideas, concepts, entities, objects, doubts and desires. Antoni Tàpies was always interested in the world and creation in a broad and deep sense
pointed out the director of the museum and exposure cooking.
The sample can already be seen in the museum and will be open until January 21, 2026.