An expansive retrospective celebrates life and work of Antoni Tàpies

The Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels (BOZAR) is presenting an expansive art exhibition on the highly regarded Spanish-Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. Antoni Tàpies: The Practice of Art (September 15, 2023 - January 7, 2024) is treating audiences to the breadth of Tàpies’s oeuvre, along with personal effects and correspondences that highlight the many hats he wore throughout his celebrated career.

The Practice of Art is organised by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, in collaboration with Bozar and the Fundació Antoni Tàpies. It is curated by Manuel Borja-Villel, the former director of the Reina Sofía, who has also served as the director of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona and the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona. On view are 120 works, organised into series such as self-portraits, surrealist works and “matter” paintings, which laid the foundation for abstract contemporary painting in Spain. After its run in Brussels, Belgium, The Practice of Art will move to the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and then to the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona.

While the exhibition presents an exhaustive offering of Tàpies’ works, Borja-Villel believes that its importance stretches beyond matters of scale. In a conversation with STIR, he says, "I used to be the director of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in the 1990s. So many years have passed since I conducted my first exhibition focusing on him. I have learned many things on a personal level since then and the world has changed as well.”

Borja-Villel considers Tàpies to represent a generation of male modernist artists who were esteemed and popular in their heyday but have since fallen out of vogue. He explains that the last few decades have seen the world adopt new cosmologies and bodies of knowledge that have expanded arts discourse beyond Eurocentric tropes. “But,” he says, underlining what he sees as the core importance of this presentation of Tàpies’ life and work, “I would argue that he is an artist that is like a bridge between two worlds: A world of avant-garde and even romantic artists, and a world wherein art practice is something that is understood to be performative and highly material.” The latter is likely a reference to the current paradigm of art discourse; an assertion aided by Borja-Villel’s perspective on Tàpies as someone who was concerned less with portraying himself as a member of the art intelligentsia, and more with being a scholar of sorts, who committed his learnings to paper and canvas. In the curator’s words, "You cannot understand the artist without understanding that he was also a collector. He exchanged works with many other artists and ended up with a body of knowledge from all over the world. He was also a scholar, not in the typically academic sense, but he was very interested in knowledge and cosmologies beyond the Eurocentric.”

Borja-Villel looks to Tàpies’s early drawings and self-portraits, the first series of works one encounters at the exhibition, for an example of the artist’s consciousness extending beyond Eurocentric tropes. He explains, “Self-portraits are a way of interrogating oneself. In his self-portraits, he is not separate from his canvas or nature, which is a tendency in western art. Instead, he portrays himself as blending with the world.”

Tàpies’s cross-cultural knowledge finds its way into more than the visual elements of his work, and Borja-Villel turns our attention to Dukkha, which was painted in 1995 in response to the artist receiving the Golden Lion at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, while the horrific Yugoslav Wars unfolded a mere train ride away. The painting features what appears to be a severed leg, within a central gulley between two equally dark sides. Its title is a Sanskrit word rooted in the Pali language and signifies suffering and sorrow. The concept of Dukkha appears in Hinduism, and more prominently so in Buddhism, wherein it is treated as the first among the four core truths within the Buddha’s teachings. However, to the artist, the word likely held particular value as the negativity it serves to denote is free from hierarchical structures of power. Dukkha is believed to affect all, without distinction, making it an appropriate title for this piece, as it is left unclear whether the leg belonged to a civilian or a soldier. Tàpies was aware of the great suffering that war causes everyone and managed to portray this masterfully through this painting’s marriage of image and title.

Borja-Villel tells STIR, "Tàpies often tried to use words from other languages to convey things that are hard to say in European languages.” He believes that the artist could have used the term "melancholia" for the painting's title, but the word is too closely linked to the collective social anxiety experienced during post-colonialism. The curator highlights the particular care with which Tàpies approached words, by paraphrasing the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges from a discussion he attended in the past. In Borges’s words, "We don't just speak our language, our language also speaks to us.”

Going beyond the exhibition’s presentation of works from across Tàpies' career, The Practice of Art also highlights the dualism of the artist’s identity as both a Spanish artist and a Catalan artist. Tàpies, who was born in Barcelona to a father who was a Catalan nationalist and a mother who came from a family of booksellers and publishers, would become a co-founder of Dau al Set, the first post-war art movement in Catalonia. It was founded in Barcelona during the oppressive Francoist Regime, which sought to erase Catalan identity, going so far as to prohibit the Catalan language from being spoken or published. During his time in Dau al Set, Tàpies would be instrumental in starting a magazine of the same name, which championed free speech and was partially written in Catalan. Simultaneously, he would utilise signs and symbols that referenced the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca within his work, in order to pay tribute to his fellow creative, who had been killed by the Francoist Regime. Borja-Villel highlights the manner in which the artist approached the two halves of his identity, telling STIR, "Catalan identity was important to him but he did not understand it in a nationalistic sense. To him, it meant fighting for freedom. So, he could be very Catalan and also reference Spanish poets such as Lorca, who felt similarly."

The exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Practice of Art may very well seem quite dense for the sheer amount of visual and written information it presents across contexts. However, to Borja-Villel it is effectively the marriage of two lines of enquiry, which the curator discusses at the end of his interview with STIR, "We are trying to do two things that might look antagonistic, but they are not, I hope. On one side, this is an exercise in research, in archaeology, to understand how Tàpies and the people around him thought in their time. And on the other side, we are trying to understand him from today’s perspective.”