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Antoni Tàpies. Head arms legs body

(…) Then the suggestion of the human body, I want to show it in an indirect way, through fingerprints or fragments, through signs. You must have noticed paintings with ambiguous representations of an arm, a hand, an armpit. I have even sought spots of the body that people consider ignoble with an aim to proving that all parts of the human body, even those considered the dirtiest, are as respectable as the others.
(…) At first I didn’t analyze this at all, but lately I have been studying the art of the Far East. Here this ambiguity is very important and I have realized that by simply drawing things lightly the spectators are forced to complete them with their imagination. This leads to the participation of the spectators in the act of creation, which I find extremely important.

Translated to English from: Antoni Tàpies, La realitat com a art, Barcelona: Laertes, 1982

http://www.fundaciotapies.org/site/spip.php?rubrique1115

Antoni Tàpies. Head arms legs body

The exhibition Antoni Tàpies. Head arms legs body focuses on the last thirteen years of the artist’s production. The main theme of the exhibition is the body. Starting with the self-portraits of his youth, the first paintings, and also in the works in varnish from the 1980s and nineties, among others, Antoni Tàpies wrestled incessantly with the representation of his existen-tial condition of man and painter.

The late works condense the brutality and direct representation of the early works, inscribed in the movements of appeasement. In tension between trace and matter, both interdependent of the other in his practice, Tàpies builds a body of work that troubles the gaze, but which is also obsessed with the materiality – the «paste like quality», as he calls it – of the painter’s work. Matter is thickness, flesh; it can be scraped, pierced, opened, covered or naked. Continue Reading →

22 June – 4 November 2012: Antoni Tàpies. Head arms legs body

Cames, 2010

The exhibition Antoni Tàpies. Head arms legs body deals with the last thirteen years of the artist’s production. The show will take place in several spaces, where viewers will be able to move from an intimate relationship with the works on paper, to the brutal and monumental confrontations of the works on wood.

The exhibition includes a selection of works centred on the body. Heads, feet, truncated torsos, scattered legs and arms, sexual organs, reveal the way Tàpies dismembers the body and works on it to create a topography of the rawness of the human condition. Linking object and subject, Tàpies often expresses a desire to shock the viewer visually.