2023-12-12 17:29:49
Open doors, open bar of artistic and musical activities, and two exhibitions to whet your appetite. On the horizon, the great retrospective that will arrive in Barcelona in the summer of 2024; in the here and now, the creator marveled by the spirit of Zen and the artist who sought answers and inspiration in science. Two sides of the same coin, that of Antoni Tàpiesmore avant-garde and restless, with which the Tàpies Foundation inaugurates the events celebrating the centenary of the birth of Catalan.
«Tàpies did not create this foundation to only exhibit his work; “He wanted it to be a place where things happened,” defended the director of the institution,Imma Prieto. And what will happen this Wednesday, the exact day on which the artist would have reached 100 years old, will be a ‘Tàpies marathon’ in which eight artists will interpret as many chapters of the ‘Personal Memory’ of the masters of informalism; Raimon and Jordi Savall they will gloss the figure of the artist and celebrate their friendship; and Marina Herlop will answer the suggestive question of the type of music that Tàpies could listen to today.
The launch of the Antoni-UPF Chair of Art and Thought and traveling activities such as ‘Tàpies’ suitcase’ and the exhibition ‘Tàpies through the word’ complete a first package of activities crowned by ‘The imprint of Zen’, exhibition that reviews and documents through 40 works, 15 of them unpublished, the influence of Buddhism and Zen on the artist’s work.
“Tàpies was not a Buddhist, but his way of painting was born from a kind of meditation,” highlights the curator of the exhibition, Núria Homs, for whom the Catalan creator “discovered in readings on Eastern philosophy, the Chinese and Hindu classics, the “Japanese art and Zen Buddhism are precedents for their own religious, political and intellectual nonconformity.”
His first contact, he adds, came through reading ‘The Book of Tea’, by Okakura Kakuzo, and between that first fascination and a subsequent trip to Japan, there was no turning back. “Buddhism, as she understood it, offered her a philosophical basis as a man and as an artist and contributed to shaping her vision of the world and art,” the curator emphasizes.
At the Tàpies Foundation, all this translates into tributes to Japanese monks such as Sengai y Hakuin; adoption of techniques and images typical of Japanese tradition, and a taste for calligraphy and ideograms. “He is a Tàpies who recovers the stroke of the brush and leaves the mural to get closer to drawing,” reflects Homs. One of the star pieces is ‘Transformation N. 6,327’, work from 1990 belonging to the Ceret Museum of Modern Art and which is exhibited for the first time in Spain.
A visitor photographs ‘Emblematic Blue’, the germ of ‘A=A, B=B’. EFE
Another mural from almost two decades earlier, ‘emblematic blue’ (1971), is the thread that Pep Vidal, doctor in Physical Sciences and artist, has pulled to put together the second exhibition that can be seen at the Tàpies Foundation: ‘A=A, B=B’. Or, in other words, a kind of expanded and updated version of ‘The New Vision of the World’, a book that compiled lectures on science and physics given in the 1950s in Saint Gallen (Switzerland) and that Tàpies had in his bedside table.
From these readings that are not always easy to digest, Vidal has recruited around twenty artists and scientists to show how science sometimes requires an act of faith. There they are, to confirm it, the 16 minutes of that video made by Irene Solà in which her roommate thinks with her eyes closed about her childhood. Or, better yet, the invisible shadow of ‘The Annunciation’ by Fra Angelico from the marks that he would have left on the Tàpies Foundation if it had been exhibited on its walls. A journey around science with Tàpies as co-pilot and Lúa Coderch, Daniel Béjar, Jorge Carrión and Mariona Moncunill, among others, reflecting on the validity of the spirit of the scientific method, the relationship between art and science or the beauty of the scientific process.
#Tàpies #revives #Zen #scientific #thought