Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, 1923-2012) has always been everyday, with his work, but so is his museum, immersed in the heart of his city, often deafened by the cars that dirty Aragó street. The building, an old publishing house by the modernist architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner, has now been transformed to host his great retrospective, which reviews a trajectory that feeds back on itself, comes and goes, with characteristics that are present from the beginning and remain until the end, never static. "I started painting eyes and I will end up painting eyes!" said a committed artist who defined himself as a realist.
Curated by Manuel Borja-Villel, first director of the Tàpies Foundation, recently converted into the Tàpies Museum, the exhibition concentrates an intense production that spanned eight decades, becoming the grand culmination of the celebration of his centenary. Antoni Tàpies. La pràctica de l'art, which can be visited until January 12, 2025, constitutes the most complete retrospective ever dedicated to him, with more than a hundred works from public institutions and national and international private collections, some of which are presented for the first time in Barcelona. After passing through Bozar in Brussels and the Reina Sofía in Madrid, it arrives in the Catalan capital with a more reduced selection, due to the smaller dimensions of the space, which has led to discarding the presentation of successive periods seen in previous exhibitions, opting for a non-chronological tour, because for the painter and sculptor time was not linear, making the works in a continuous interrelation that expands their meanings.
With a proposal that goes from bottom to top, one has to go down stairs to start. There are the self-portraits he made during a long convalescence due to a lung disease, an initial exploration path with which he approached different artistic traditions, with those intense eyes that look at himself, but also at others, returning to them years later. Newspapers, ropes, scratches appear early; already manifesting his criticism of academic art, opening new avenues, as seen in the exhibition with Composició (1947), a scratched oil on canvas, which is also the first piece he presented in a public exhibition.
But also very soon appears the claim, with the recovery of surrealism, the last avant-garde movement before the Civil War that Francoism had purged, reading forbidden books and magazines that arrived from France, with surprises like Somac, el lleó (1949), from a private collection, little exhibited, until seen for the first time here by Borja-Villel. Fantastic fauna and flora that clash with the standard image of Tàpies, but that draw from the inner world, with a maximum exponent, Homenatge a Federico García Lorca (1951), in which he points out the crime, a work censored by the Francoist authorities.
From the 1950s, he moved towards material paintings, in line with European informalism and American abstract expressionism, a moment that coincided with his international projection, with exhibitions all over the world. His contempt for academicism made him more physical, creating on a table or directly on the floor, accumulating different materials such as marble dust, cement or earth, looking at his work from above and leaving his mark. Some of his main motifs emerge, such as those polysemic T's, changing meaning over the years, depending on how he presents them or what he accompanies them with. With the foundations laid, the exhibition tour continues, going down the stairs, with two options available, although it doesn't matter if one takes one path or another. The main floor explodes with his political commitment against the violence of Francoism, when matter transforms and approaches reality even more, with everyday objects becoming a central element of his paintings, but also with his intimacy, never ashamed of sexuality or of the scatological.
There are old furniture and dirty towels converted into works of art, with the seemingly simple Pila de plats (1970) as the most powerful, in addition to what the artist himself considered his most political piece. It is the image he immortalized of the Caputxinada, focusing on the humble life of the Franciscan monks, but also on the camaraderie that was established among those locked in the convent for days, asserting the strength of a concept now more widespread such as community, as he also did by glimpsing the destruction of nature that was already being committed. A Catalanist and left-wing stance, with the four bars accompanied by a fifth red one in Caixa de la camisa roja (1972), which is not tarnished when his more personal side appears, in smaller pieces dedicated to his partner, Teresa Barba. The 56 experimental drawings of Sèrie Teresa (1966) constitute a long love letter, always realistic, with explicit allusions to shared life, with that use of black that he identifies as closer to nature, less prefabricated.
There are also the varnishes, which are present in the material paintings and end up becoming the main resource, resembling honey and making the works more luminous. This is the eighties, coinciding with the reception of many awards for his career and the establishment of his foundation, which would lead to the opening of the museum in 1990, but also with the AIDS pandemic. A stage that is then continued by the wars and genocides of the nineties, giving rise to black backgrounds and wounded bodies, with melancholy, pain and death oozing from paintings such as Estora (1994) and Cos i filferros (1996). "I suppose it can be said that I am pessimistic because I transmit a series of painful experiences, but what I really try to do is expose them as a way of discovering the causes of suffering and mitigating some of the effects. In other words, as a way of improving our existence," he told Borja-Villel in an interview.
With all that accumulated sediment, one reaches an attic in the Tàpies Museum, with the library behind. Tàpies imagined during the course what he would paint, thinking about the sizes and formats he would need, but concentrated his creation in summer, in his farmhouse in Montseny, where, when he arrived in June, he already had the canvases he was going to use prepared. One work followed the previous one and so on, creating an atlas in which there is no one creation more important than another, but a whole. He looked at them from above, as can be done these days in his museum, better understanding that complementary whole, discovering new symbols that are repeated, establishing new relationships that unite them, even changing his mind.