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Ignasi Aballí – Diagrams 17 January – 7 March 2020


Ignasi Aballí – Diagrames
17 January – 7 March 2020
Opening: Thursday January 16th at 7 pm

Ignasi Aballí (Barcelona, 1958) is one of the most renowned artists of his generation in the Spanish art world. His work deals with the boundaries between artistic creation and everyday life and often includes the use of household materials such as dust, newspaper cuttings or the fibre remains of a clothes dryer.

He applies a highly controlled methodology to his work, but it is often based on the artist’s non-intervention in order to leave the creative process in the hands of chance, light, time, etc. Another feature of his work is the expression of a presence arising from its absence, the use of opposing concepts, lists of words taken from newspapers dealing with the accumulation of information in the media or temporary interventions using the architecture of exhibition spaces or their walls as an artistic medium.

Galeria Toni Tàpies has produced two editions of unpublished engravings by the artist. The first, “Set estampacions d’una planxa de gravat” (Seven prints from an engraving plate) comprises, as its title indicates, seven prints from a blank engraving plate that changes position, always badly centred on the paper. As is often the case in Aballí’s work, their main protagonist is absence or invisibility. The image is simply suggested by the edges of this changing position plate. It could be said that these engravings provide a document of the performative act of placing the plate on some paper, regardless of whether it contains an image.

The second series, entitled “Esquema I a VI” (Diagrams I to VI), is like a school chart, with an ordered series of numbers at the bottom of the engraving that refer to the same numbers distributed randomly at the top, each indicating a blank space, like a metaphor for the indefinable. The numbers at the bottom in a second group all correspond to the word “Void”, which is randomly distributed at the top of the engraving, where the numbers are not accompanied by any images. The last group of this series has several boxes containing words such as “intangible”, “absent” or “inaccessible”, all indicating the difficulty of capturing ultimate reality, a similarly recurrent theme in the artist’s work.

The exhibition is completed by three drawings. The subject of two of these is the absence of dust that once covered them in an area of the paper that has been blown away. In the third, Aballí has employed the sheets of paper used to clean the engraving plates in a type of contact magic that transfers the creation from one medium to the other.

Ignasi Aballí has held several solo exhibitions both in Spain and abroad, including at MACBA (Barcelona, 2005), Fundação de Serralves (Porto, 2006), IKON Gallery (Birmingham, 2006), ZKM (Karlsruhe, 2006), Pinacoteca do Estat (São Paulo, 2010), Artium (Vitoria, 2012), Museu Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2015), Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona, 2016), Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colómbia (Bogotá, 2017), Art Gallery Kula (Split, 2018) and Museum of Contemporary Art (Zagreb, 2018). His work has been displayed at various times in the following galleries: Estrany-De la Mota (Barcelona), Elba Benítez (Madrid) and Meessen de Clercq (Brussels), and has also been seen at: Proyecto Paralelo (Mexico City), Thomas Bernard-Cortex Athletico (Paris), Pedro Oliveira (Porto), Nordenhake (Berlin) and Blueproject Foundation (Barcelona). He participated in the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), 8th Sharjah Biennial (United Arab Emirates, 2007), 11th Biennale of Sydney (1998), 4th Guangzhou Triennial (China, 2012) and 13th Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador, 2016). He was awarded the Joan Miró Prize in 2015.

2020.01.16 News Comments Off on Ignasi Aballí – Diagrams 17 January – 7 March 2020

Alex Katz, Emma Kay, Ed Pien, Antoni Tàpies October 3rd – November 8th 2019

Expo gravats gran format 2

Galeria Toni Tàpies is pleased to present a new exhibition of work on paper, revisiting artists that have accompanied us throughout our trajectory. From different perspectives, the artists we present have rediscovered drawing and work on paper. On one hand, Tàpies, who worked daily on drawing and reached levels of magnificence where so little tells us so much. Emma Kay, on the other hand, with her specific work on memory tells us a lot more in what is missing than in what she actually shows.

And if with Alex Katz his works on paper are fundamental in the preparation of his paintings, and where the abstraction and minimal reduction of the reality that surrounds him makes it beautiful, clear and elegant, Ed Pien and his folds and repetitions as an important part of the creative process bring us closer to a new field where the oneiric takes shape.

On Paper also wants to present a variety of techniques and approaches used by the artists to create different kind of images. Through their explorations, they have gone beyond the classical intervention with pencil, ink, paint on traditional paper, and opened up to new possibilities and meanings.

Alex Katz was born 1927 to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, NY, as the son of an émigré who had lost a factory he owned in Russia to the Soviet revolution. In 1928 the family moved to ST. Albans, Queens, where Katz grew up.

From 1946 to 1949 Katz studied at The Cooper Union in New York, and from 1949 to 1950 he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. Skowhegan exposed him to painting from life, which would prove pivotal in his development as a painter and remains a staple of his practices today. Katz explains that Skowhegan’s plein air painting gave him “a reason to devote my life to painting”. Katz has admitted to destroying a thousand paintings during his first ten years as a painter in order to find his style. Since the 1950s, he worked to create art more freely in the sense that he tried to paint “faster than [he] can think.” His works seem simple, but according to Katz they are more reductive, which is fitting to his personality. “(The) one thing I don’t want to do is things already done. As for particular subject matter, I don’t like narratives, basically.”

Emma Kay (London, 1961) is a British artist working with subjectivity and memory. Kay studied art at Goldsmiths College, working toward a BA from 1980–83 and an MA from 1995 -97.

Her early work consisted of compiling index-like lists of inanimate objects from a selection of novels. The Bible from Memory was her first ‘memory’ text using only her own recall of the text and was included in the British Art Show 5 2001 held at the South Bank Centre in London. This was followed by Shakespeare from Memory in 1998, three drawings The World from Memory I, II and III, 1998, and Worldview, 1999, an attempt to write down the History of the Whole World from memory. Future, 2001, (Chisenhale Gallery) is a digital film that describes the future of the world, while The Story of Art, 2003, (Tate Modern) is a digital film attempting to write the history of art.

Ed Pien (Taipei, 1958) Ed Pien is a Canadian artist based in Toronto. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, he immigrated to Canada with his family at the age of eleven. He draws on sources both Eastern and Western to create his work, including Asian ghost stories, hell scrolls, calligraphic traditions and the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya, creating sensual, drawing-based installations using ink and translucent paper. In his most recent body of work, Pien has replaced ink and gouache with an x-acto knife in order to produce large-scale paper cuts.

Pien has shown extensively, both nationally and internationally, in venues that include the Drawing Centre, NYC: the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Canadian Culture Centre in Paris; The Goethe Institute in Berlin; The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; The Art Gallery of Ontario; Musée des beaux arts, Montreal; Musée d’art contemporain, Montreal; Songzhuang Art Centre, Beijing; aswell as the National Art Gallery of Canada.

Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, 1923-2012). His first painterly explorations, produced in the late-1940s and early-1950s and still marked by Surrealism, provided him with a base for research into physical nature of objects and their materiality. Very soon, though, his work began to focus on the search for new expressive parameters in which texture played a key role. He quickly began to produce works with relief, fragments torn off, lacerations, rips, linking him to informalism and to American abstract expressionism. He later began to incorporate doors, windows and the human body, and to use collage and assemblage in highly personal work that won him international recognition.

Today, the work of Antoni Tàpies forms part of numerous public and private collections, including those of the Tate Gallery in the United Kingdom, MoMA in New York, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, the Musée d’Art Moderne and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, amongst others. Tàpies also took part in Documenta, and at the Venice Biennale on several occasions and was awarded the Golden Lion in 1993. He also presented countless solo exhibitions at international galleries. These include, particularly, retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1962 and 1995), the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1973), the Nationalsgalerie in Berlin (1974), the Louisiana Museum of Art, Denmark (1974), the Hayward Gallery, London (1974), the Seibu Museum of Art, Tokyo (1976), the Musée d’Art Moderne de Montreal, Quebec, Canada (1977) – and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (1990), amongst others. The Antoni Tàpies Foundation was established in Barcelona in 1990.

2019.10.18 News Comments Off on Alex Katz, Emma Kay, Ed Pien, Antoni Tàpies October 3rd – November 8th 2019

Antoni Tàpies. Obra gràfica. Grans formats

Expo gravats gran format 2

February / May 2017

Galeria Toni Tàpies presents a exhibition of graphic work by Antoni Tàpies, a selection of prints made between 1990 and 2009, some of them can be seen for the first time in Barcelona. The exhibition is entitled Large formats.Graphic works and can be visited until May 2017.

2017.03.16 News Comments Off on Antoni Tàpies. Obra gràfica. Grans formats

Antoni Tàpies. Roba blanca

samarreta blanca

September / December 2016

‘I did it […] in keeping with a pattern in my work, in which objects, clothes, etc. have been appearing for years, in accordance with an urge that is part Franciscan and part Buddhist to accord value to things that are small, without wanting to raise a polemic. I did it with the sense of giving a cosmic dimension to something that is insignificant.’

Antoni Tàpies made this remark in relation to his sculptural project entitled Mitjó (Sock) to the press in 1991. In this improvised way, the artist succinctly and very lucidly gave the reasons for a constant in his career: the use of everyday and at the same time universal objects in his work.

Galeria Toni Tàpies is proposing an exhibition project entitled Roba blanca (White Linens), which reflects on the value and meaning of the most intimate object in Tàpies’ pictorial work. On display will be a selection of pieces in which we will find a constant return to a series of very specific items: his personal belongings, things the artist had to hand at home or in his studio; close, familiar, simple and useful objects, among them handkerchiefs, scarves, socks, slippers, pieces of white fabric that had a life and were then abandoned and no longer used. But these are not anonymous objects; they are not random objets trouvés found by chance wherever he happened to be. These objects and pieces of fabric come from humans’ most immediate surroundings, the environment closest to them. They have been in contact with his own body or the bodies of his loved ones, fabric items that accompany and protect us from birth to our final moments. The abandoned object no longer used for the purpose for which it was created is also a cherished item, and for this reason it is difficult to part company with it, to cast it aside for good. In these works, we can identify everyday elements that were part of the artist’s most private experiences and which were given a new existence in the form of a collage on fabric or wood; once they had been manipulated, impregnated with paint or varnish, they were reborn and acquired a symbolic and universal meaning.

Tàpies chose this type of material for a reason: it has a symbolic meaning that he gives to it and which speaks to us of the importance of everything that is humble, the small things that, at first glance, are insignificant. The white colour of these objects is also important, as it points us to that which is pure, clean and innocent, to plenitude, light and eternity, but also to death and mourning in Eastern cultures. In the artist’s universe, a cosmic dimension is accorded to modest, commonplace objects, those that are part of a whole. In this, there is a wish that connects with Buddhism and Zen philosophy and which showcases that which at first sight seems banal, poor or trivial.

2016.10.25 News , , , , , Comments Off on Antoni Tàpies. Roba blanca

BARCELONA GALLERY WEEKEND 2016

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This fall Galeria Toni Tàpies will participate in Barcelona Gallery Weekend, an event for art lovers, collectors, professionals and artists which was created in 2015 with the aim of becoming one of the annual musts of Barcelona. A unique weekend to discover a comprehensive programme in the most prominent city galleries, artistic interventions in special venues, guided routes, project spaces and exhibitions at the main museums and institutions.

Galeria Toni Tàpies is proposing an exhibition project entitled Roba blanca, which reflects on the value and meaning of the most intimate object in Tàpies’ pictorial work. On display will be a selection of pieces in which we will find a constant return to a series of very specific items: his personal belongings, things the artist had to hand at home or in his studio; close, familiar, simple and useful objects, among them handkerchiefs, scarves, socks, slippers, pieces of white fabric that had a life and were then abandoned and no longer used

In these works, we can identify everyday elements that were part of the artist’s most private experiences and which were given a new existence in the form of a collage on fabric or wood; once they had been manipulated, impregnated with paint or varnish, they were reborn and acquired a symbolic and universal meaning.

2016.07.19 News , , , Comments Off on BARCELONA GALLERY WEEKEND 2016

Antoni Tàpies. Nothing Is Without Consequence

Ofrena

Galeria Toni Tàpies, Barcelona

November 2015/ March 2016
Opening: 26/11/15  19.00 h

“We’re often asked fateful questions: What does that represent? What did you want to say with those blots? Do you think that by using these lines or those materials, people will understand your ideas? By and large, we keep quiet because we give up at the outset due to the impossibility of expressing in a few words – and even of finding the right ones – things we have perhaps been brooding on for years… Generally, the person asking the question wants to know something about a particular work or even about just one sign or a specific fragment. And today, as we have repeatedly said, the meaning of a work is almost impossible to find in that work, because one piece is connected to many others, your own pieces and those by others. To explain one of them means going back over almost the entire history of art of our time.”

Nothing Is Without Consequence

In February 1970, Antoni Tàpies wrote an article in which he proposed to analyse one of his own works in order to give a few clues to the spectator who was perplexed and at a loss at the sight of it. With many detours, digressions and sharp turns, the artist succeeded in substantiating his discourse and proposed a dense and generous analysis that allows us to grasp the fact that every detail is important and that indeed, as the title of his article announces, “nothing is without consequence”…

It is precisely in the details and the small things, in the context and the juxtaposition, in what lies outside our field of vision or far from our centre of attention, that the essential resides. As the reader loses his way in a maze of explanations, he does not immediately grasp that the author is playing with him. The author never truly had any intention of explaining one of his works but wanted instead to lead the spectator into a relaxed and trusting frame of mind. In other words, a state of playful predisposition in which the spectator readies himself to witness a magic show. That innocent state that is receptive to the mysterious is what allows us to believe in the dove that emerges from the handkerchief or in the rabbit that comes out of a hat. Tàpies also appeals to that state of reverence so dear to people from the East, in which the object, however ephemeral or modest it may be, is presented with ceremony and commitment. He sees this ability of the spectator to allow himself to be captured willingly by the mystification of the artist and of art as the sine qua non for truly attaining that meditative state that allows us to grasp the profound sense and real beauty of things.

This is why we have made the decision to allow the smallest and the most humble works to speak about themselves. Isolated or side by side, they refer to each other while remaining different and unique. The Galeria Toni Tàpies is pleased to present an exhibition of small-format works – most of them never shown in public before – that present themselves as a magic trick, a book of poetry or a collection of haikus. An exhibition in which every detail matters, in which the spectator is invited to take part in the game and the ceremony with innocence and candour. For, as we must remember, nothing is without consequence…

2015.11.26 News Comments Off on Antoni Tàpies. Nothing Is Without Consequence

Tàpies: An Artist’s Collection 12/06/15 – 10/01/16

Riera de Can Pins - copia per web

Fundació Antoni Tàpies 

Opening: 11/06/15  19.30 h

In general, an artist’s collection consists of works by others together with the artist’s own works. The works by others come from two different sources: firstly, the most active one, consists of items purchased by the artist; the second, rather more passive, consists of works by other artists received either by exchange or by generous donation. The collection of Antoni Tàpies is no exception. Begun in the mid-1940s in parallel to his own artistic development, it was not until the 1960s, coinciding with the consolidation of his career, that the collection really took off.

Tàpies had in mind two references: firstly, the model of the artist-collector offered by Picasso and Miró, whose studios he had visited in his youth – Picasso with a remarkable collection of African and modern art, Miró with a collection of objects from popular culture and nature – and, secondly, the special Christmas 1934 issue of the magazine D’Ací i d’Allà, dedicated to the art of the twentieth century, and some numbers of Cahiers d’art, especially the 1936 issue devoted to the object, which contributed to his discovery of modern art and the relationships that it established with other manifestations, both artistic and popular. Tàpies wrote:

‘The D’Ací i d’Allà issue has been with me all my life and I still have it at home, now signed by its authors. The emotion brought about by Picasso’s Woman in a Shirt; the Braque still life; the Futurist paintings by Severini; the fabulous still life by Juan Gris, which disconcerted me with the ambiguity of its meticulous realism that at once wasn’t realistic; the geometries of Kandinsky and Mondrian; the magic of Max Ernst; the great glass of Duchamp; Miró’s Man with Pipe, which reminded me of prehistoric cave paintings; and the bursting yellows and reds of his stencil; it was all a shock that seemed to bring light to the inner landscapes of my imagination.’

Tàpies built a heterogeneous collection, which includes works of Western art and art from Africa, Asia and Oceania, samples of folk art and the art of the mentally ill, films, photographs and rare books, a collection that embraces a wide historical period from the Egypt and Mesopotamia of antiquity to Western art of the twentieth century, from the early avant-garde to German Neo-Expressionism. This collection documents the interests, affinities and ambitions of the artist, and establishes a network of relationships with his work, not in terms of mimesis, but rather of common inspiration, since Tàpies felt inspired by artists who, like him, wanted to create a kind of art that went beyond the mere decorative object and had the ability to make the viewer think.

Between 2014 and 2015, the heirs of Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) gave on deposit to the Fundació a collection of 230 works that are part of that collection. Largely, this consignment is composed of works by Tàpies from the mid-1940s to the late 1980s, but also includes a selection of 31 works by artists of the twentieth century such as Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Kurt Schwitters, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning, Sam Francis and Robert Motherwell, among others. The deposit has enriched the Fundació’s Collection, which consists of nearly 400 original works by Tàpies, including paintings, sculptures, objects and drawings from all periods of his artistic production, and more than 1,500 prints and rare books, donated by Teresa and Antoni Tàpies to the Fundació.

The exhibition Tàpies: An Artist’s Collection has been constructed exclusively from part of that deposit. It is not the first time that the Fundació addresses the artist’s collection. In 2010, to mark the reopening of the museum after the second renovation and refurbishment of the building, it organised the exhibition Antoni Tàpies. The Places of Art, which was comprised of a hundred works including paintings, objects and rare books, mostly by other artists, although it included two works by Tàpies himself. On that occasion, the exhibition focused on works from his library at home, and the close relationship that arose out of this proximity. More recently, in 2013, the exhibition Tàpies. From Within focused on a selection of works from the artist’s studio and from the Collection of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies. Presented jointly by the Fundació and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, the exhibition focused exclusively on works by the artist.

Tàpies: An Artist’s Collection offers a look at around twenty works of modern Western art and forty by Tàpies – these last covering the period represented in the deposit, with a special emphasis on previously unseen or lesser known works. The exhibition begins with works by artists whose direct influence can be seen in Tàpies’ early works – such as Paul Klee, Joan Miró and Max Ernst –, and works by Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Duchamp and Hans Arp, to whom Tàpies felt particularly attracted. This is followed by a selection of works by his contemporaries, those with whom he shared a feeling of affinity, such as Jean Dubuffet and the American artists Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Sam Francis and Robert Motherwell. This section of the exhibition is accompanied by a selection of letters, photographs, invitations, catalogues and reference books from his personal library that were donated to the Fundació’s Library in 1990. Among them are editions of the special Christmas 1934 issue of the magazine D’Ací i d’Allà featuring the diaries of Paul Klee, of Woman with 100 Heads by Max Ernst, a selection of writings by Marcel Duchamp, and some issues of the magazines Cahiers d’art and Documents.

The itinerary continues with works by Tàpies on other levels of the building. His formative years are represented by an eclectic selection of works from 1945 to 1951: from the early works of 1945, of an Expressionist and dreamlike nature, full of symbolism and Nordic influences (especially Munch); to those inspired by Surrealism in the period 1947–49; followed by works from the period 1949–51, with representations of lunar landscapes, where both composition and colour bring to mind certain images of Klee and Miró.

The exhibition also includes a selection of Tàpies’ matter paintings from the beginnings of his mature period in the mid- 1950s, with examples from 1955–56 and works from the following decade characterised by the appearance of walls, the density of the textures and a limited palette – greys, ochres and browns – colours that, for him, are related to the inner world and thought. The exhibition continues with a large selection of works from the 1980s, accompanied by examples from the 1970s, in which heavy matter paintings are seen next to other works with almost empty surfaces where varnish is the protagonist. The return of the object, which Tàpies incorporated widely in his work in the late 1960s and during the 1970s, also features in one work from 1987.

The exhibition highlights many of the recurring themes in the work of Tàpies, which he repeated at different creative moments. Among such themes, walls suggesting the passage of time, enclosure or graffiti inscriptions in the 1950s, reappear in the 1970s and 1980s; landscape, specifically the Montseny landscape, where Tàpies worked during the summers, is both setting and self-portrait; fragmented parts of the body are represented in an iconic and indicative form; everyday objects that are attached to the surface of the canvas or represented iconographically signifying the importance that simple and poor objects held for the artist; the influence of Eastern philosophies that can be seen in the representation of a smiling Buddha or the reference to the universe in an outstretched hand; and the importance of delving into the knowledge that evokes the image of the scale. These are themes that exemplify the concerns Tàpies was addressing in his work in an attempt to explain through art his way of understanding the world.

The exhibition is accompanied by the screening of the previously unseen documentary by Maria Lluïsa Borràs, Antoni Tàpies, made in 1981, with music by Josep Maria Mestres Quadreny. The film, conceived as a sound photoscope, reviews the work of the artist, his artistic, literary and cultural references, and his historical and personal context. The recovery of this documentary was made possible thanks to the generosity of Adelaida Frías Borràs,and the collaboration of the Filmoteca de Catalunya. © Fundació Antoni Tàpies

2015.06.09 News Comments Off on Tàpies: An Artist’s Collection 12/06/15 – 10/01/16

Tàpies: From Within 06/02/15 – 03/05/15

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Pérez Art Museum Miami
1103 Biscayne Blvd. Miami, FL 33132
www.pamm.org

Tàpies: From Within is a major historical survey that features a selection of more than 50 large-scale paintings and sculptures, representing diverse moments from throughout Antoni Tàpies’ career. These include early examples from 1945 through to recent works created in 2011—the year prior to his death. The exhibition explores the Spanish artist’s use of unusual materials and forms and the development of his unique visual language, which earned him an international reputation as one of the most successful abstract painters of his generation.

Curated by former Tate Director Vincente Todolí, this retrospective offers a unique view into Tàpies’ groundbreaking practice, which fused impoverished materials with symbols of Eastern and Western culture to create dense works covered with graffiti-like gestures. His alchemical practice mixed spiritual and existential questions with unique material investigations of surface, mark-making, and found objects. The exhibition presents an intimate and unusual view of his oeuvre, through a selection of works drawn exclusively from his own private collection and that of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies.

Tàpies. From Within is an exhibition organised by Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, in collaboration with the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, and curated by Vicente Todolí.

And more…

Timothy Taylor Gallery, London
Art Fair ZONA MACO
04–08 /02/15
Centro Banamex, Hall D. Mexico City, Mexico

Inauguration: Wednesday 4: 4:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Thursday 5, Friday 6, Saturday 7: 12:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Sunday 8: 12:00 pm to 8:00 pm

www.zonamaco.com
www.timothytaylor.com

________________________________________________________________________________

Antoni Tàpies 1923-2012
12/02/15 – 21/03/15
Pace Gallery, New York
32 East 57th Street, New York NY 10022

www.pacegallery.com

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Antoni Tàpies. Prints
19/02/15 – 21/03/15
Pace Prints 

32 East 57th Street, New York NY 10022

www.paceprints.com

________________________________________________________________________________

Books Beyond Artists: Words and Images
24/02/15 – 09/05/15
Ivorypress España
Comandante Zorita 46-48, 28020 Madrid

www.ivorypress.com

2015.01.27 News Comments Off on Tàpies: From Within 06/02/15 – 03/05/15

Antoni Tàpies. Transfiguració 1994-2011

Vernis i dibuix

On November 20th, the gallery opened Transfiguració (Transfiguration), an exhibition of works by Antoni Tàpies. It is a moment of great significance for us as it be the peak of our twentieth anniversary celebrations. For this particular occasion, we have selected paintings executed by the artist during the period spanning the gallery’s opening year to Tàpies’ most recent works, from 1994 to 2011. Transfiguració also wants to highlight an important period in the artist’s life, a moment where his artistic maturity expressed a fantastic freedom as well as a strong sense of spirituality and ephemerality.

2015.01.26 News Comments Off on Antoni Tàpies. Transfiguració 1994-2011

A new record price for an Antoni Tàpies’ painting in a Christie’s auction

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The auction house Christie’s in London sold on 1 July, for a little over two million euro the work Gran ocre amb incisions by Antoni Tàpies. This is a new world record expects a painter’s work, this piece is from 1961, is a mixed media and measures 260 x 195 cm.

2014.07.08 News Comments Off on A new record price for an Antoni Tàpies’ painting in a Christie’s auction

Galeria Toni Tàpies: 1994-2014 Dialogues of a Collection. Ann Veronica Janssens, Jana Sterbak

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To mark the twentieth anniversary of the gallery, we are presenting a cycle of exhibitions featuring outstanding works from our collection. For the fourth stage of this cycle, we welcome spring with a rainbow of contrasts, in which the ice of the north melts under the sun of the south. We present a dialogue between two significant and complex pieces in the gallery’s collection, Reggae Colour, by Ann Veronica Janssens, and Narcisse, by Jana Sterbak. Both works seek to transcend the material, the magic of transformation and the search for a spiritual meaning. Furthermore, the works offer a fresh and dynamic approach, playing with colours, textures, light and temperature.

Most of the time Ann Veronica Janssens works with visual installations, transforming architectural spaces and altering the perception we have thereof, often playing with visual and light effects and intending to make the material less tangible and cumbersome. The artist is concerned with the perception of the matter, seeking to render the dominant material nature absent. Reggae Colour shown here, is a good example of this specific approach. It is an ephemeral sculpture – since it cannot be switched on permanently – which diffuses light of gradient, bright colours that connect us with the light, shades and atmosphere of the Tropics, with a relaxed lifestyle and the music of those places affording us an intense experience of space and colour.

Moreover, for the first time at the gallery, we present an installation which features a sculpture that is also ephemeral and delicate by Jana Sterbak. Entitled Narcisse, it refers to the beautiful young man in Greek mythology who, in love with his own reflection, was cursed to peer at himself for eternity. It consists of two chairs facing one another, made of stainless steel and of glass and ice respectively. This means that while one chair remains perfect forever – as if it were frozen – symbolising youth and memory, the other one gradually dissolves over the passage of time, representing reality and ageing. Resembling a performance, the chair made of ice will slowly transform before our eyes during the gallery’s opening hours until it virtually vanishes; just a few pieces of iron, a pool of water and chunks of ice scattered on the floor will remind us of the existence of this exceedingly ephemeral sculpture.

In 1994, Toni Tàpies opened a gallery space in Barcelona, inspired by his desire to work with contemporary artists as well as show high quality work of art. Over the years, Galeria Toni Tàpies became a significant venue of the Barcelona art scene, showing the work of recognized contemporary artists and of emerging young artists. The fascination for exciting, edgy and risky projects, the love for creation and the respect for the artists became the gallery signature and remained the gallery’s signature of the last twenty years.

2014.03.19 News Comments Off on Galeria Toni Tàpies: 1994-2014 Dialogues of a Collection. Ann Veronica Janssens, Jana Sterbak

Antoni Tàpies. Collection, # 7

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The Fundació presents a new selection of works by Antoni Tàpies from the Collection. The show, which this time focuses on Spaces A and D, includes various creative moments in the artist’s career from the 1940s to the present decade, and illustrates the evolution of typologies, techniques and materials used by Tàpies.

In Space A, the itinerary begins with a selection of works from the two-year period 1946–47, which highlights an early interest in extra-pictorial materials, an interest that becomes the hallmark of his mature production and can be seen in later works such as Earth and paint(1956), Matter with Lateral Papers (1963) and Book-Wall (1990), among others. The exhibition also features a selection of works that incorporate the object (such as Mettal Shutter and Violin, made for the window display of the Gales shop over Christmas 1956), and bronze sculptures (such as Drum and Pitcher and Boot, both 1987). Furthermore, you can see works from the 1990s and 2000s displaying several recurring themes, including an interest in matter, everyday objects and writing. The exhibition incorporates a selection of prints made during the period 1959–87 (Space D).

The itinerary finishes with a screening of the documentary Tàpies(1990) by Gregory Rood, produced by the BBC–TVE Catalunya, which is projected in the Fundació Auditorium (Space C).

2014.03.11 News Comments Off on Antoni Tàpies. Collection, # 7

Galeria Toni Tàpies: 1994-2014. Dialogues of a Collection

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In 1994, Toni Tàpies opened a gallery space in Barcelona, inspired by his desire to work with contemporary artists as well as show high quality work of art. Over the years, Galeria Toni Tàpies became a significant venue of the Barcelona art scene, showing the work of recognized contemporary artists and of emerging young artists. The fascination for exciting, edgy and risky projects, the love for creation and the respect for the artists became the gallery signature and remained the gallery’s signature of the last twenty years. In order to celebrate this important anniversary, the gallery presents a cycle of exhibitions where outstanding works from our collection are shown in a distinct context and under a different light. These small exhibitions are focused on pieces whose artistic, technical or historic features make them particularly relevant or important, and by unusual or new associations and are compelled to create new dialogues and meanings.

For the third segment of this cycle, and for the first exhibition of the year, Galeria Toni Tàpies is very pleased to present a show wrapped in red. Crimson, scarlet, ruby, burgundy, cherry, tomato, cardinal, beetroot, oxblood, red devil, blood bath, red bull, sporty car, kinky underwear, intense wine, red lipstick and sports club shirt, war, fire and hell. Red is masculine, powerful, erotic, luxurious, intense, violent, bloody and dramatic. Red is the colour of Mars, the colour of tragedy and deep emotions, the colour of Caravaggio and Christianity, the colour of anger, action, desire, passion and ambition. Red is overwhelming and exhilarating. Red is always better dressed in black and white, where it could reigns properly, hide and shine gloriously, at the same time. It has been mastered and used by the greatest painters of all time. Red is the true colour of art.

Four strong artists from different backgrounds and generations are brought together today to stain the gallery with their own personal version of red. Antoni Tàpies, Edward Burtynsky, Jaume Plensa and João Onofre, who have had a strong and continuous presence at the gallery along its history. They are intense artists who have never been afraid to take space, mark their presence physically and engrave our imagination. Through their work, red – still a very manly colour – is revealed as a more cynical and rebellious colour. As the Christ transformed water in wine, here, water becomes nickel, blood is wine, paint is water and crystal is ink. Drama and death becomes beauty, passion is light and volatile, fatality is an opportunity and pessimism is the funniest way to start the day. This exhibition emphasizes on some dramatic perspectives, spiced up with some tricky transformative twists. Red resonates with new vibrations, nothing is what exactly what it seems to be. The human tragedy might inspires the best comedy.

And slowly, by contradiction, red may rises as the new pink. The colour of optimism and enthusiasm. Let’s not forget that today starts the Chinese’s New Year and use the occasion to celebrate even more. Since red is China’s favourite colour, where it brings good luck, and above all, prosperity, there is no better way than to start the new year with a large glass of red optimism…

2014.01.24 News Comments Off on Galeria Toni Tàpies: 1994-2014. Dialogues of a Collection

Galeria Toni Tàpies: 1994-2014. Drawings from the collection

In 2014, the Galeria Toni Tàpies will celebrate twenty years devoted to organising exhibition activities of the first order. Over the years, the gallery has achieved a strong presence on the Barcelona art scene, producing shows by internationally-recognised contemporary artists, from emerging young talents to firmly consolidated figures. In order to celebrate this twentieth anniversary, we have launched a season of one-off exhibitions that feature a series of outstanding works from our collection. These shows will focus on pieces whose artistic, technical or historic features make them particularly relevant or important, often generating subtle dialogues between works by different artists.

In the first event in this exhibition season, we will present a symbolic dialogue on love and hate. The two works featured, Susy Gómez’s Maldito Corazón (Damned Heart) and Jeff Brouws’ Trinity Site 8, compare and contrast these emotions in the most subtle ways, exploring such themes as sadness, pain and passion, destruction and creation, ugliness and beauty.

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2013.11.21 News Comments Off on Galeria Toni Tàpies: 1994-2014. Drawings from the collection

Antoni Tàpies. From object to sculpture (1964-2009)

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Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

To commemorate the first anniversary of the artist’s death, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Antoni Tàpies. From Object to Sculpture (1964–2009), the first comprehensive, in-depth survey of a fascinating facet of an artist who marked the second half of the 20th century.
Sponsored by Iberdrola, the exhibition features nearly one hundred works spanning the Tàpies’s sculpture production spanning almost five decades: from the early objects and assemblages of the 1960s and 70s, to his more recent fire-clay and bronze pieces, including the last sculpture signed by the artist in 2009.

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2013.10.16 News Comments Off on Antoni Tàpies. From object to sculpture (1964-2009)