Antoni Tapies The Resources of Rhetoric May 16-0ctober 19, 2009
Dia:Beacon Riggio Galleries 3 Beekman Street Beacon New York 12508 845 440 0100 www.diaart.org Antoni Tapies: The Resources of Rhetoric
The work of Antoni Ta.pies does not fall neatly within the parameters of traditional art flatness of the canvas but instead folds back onto itself. Ta.pies explores the material history; for, customarily, it has been lodged between two worlds, that of the modern, ist basis of painting in an exceptional manner. His work reflects both the material of which was coming to a close when the Catalan artist began his career in the early the form and the form of the material, without annulling their differences as orthodox 1950s, and that of the postmodern, which had yet to manifest itself. Tapies's painting modernism would. Tapies's works maintain a structural ambiguity that complicates is perhaps too object-based for critics who sought an essential Greenbergian purity their assimilation into systems that gravitate toward normalization and commodifica and too gestural, expressionist, and constrained by the restrictions of the frame for tion. Split between object, painting, and writing, his works have sculptural and tactile those who focused on the aesthetic of the expanded field, as defined by Rosalind qualities that, while clearly engaging with the precepts of painting, avoid any form of . Krauss. However, the vivacious welcome his oeuvre enjoyed from critics such as idealism. As a result, despite the evidence of a certain inclination toward aestheticism, Michel Tapie, Giulio Carlo Argan, and the Spanish writer Juan Eduardo Cirlot might Tapies's paintings never fall into mere decoration nor could they be described as today seem excessively personal and mystical, remnants of a humanist past that are fetishistic. To the contrary, his virtuosity is instilled in the form of rhetoric-in a now distant, remote. material form of writing that cancels out the decorative.
Heir to Spain's brilliant early avant-garde, whose most celebrated members included When Ta.pies is painting, he is actually writing. As a successor of Mallarme, he Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, and Salvador Dair, Ta.pies is unquestionably the lead- reinterprets "A Throw of the Dice" through Antonin Artaud's notion of abyssal experi ing figure in the country's art world of the second half of the twentieth century and ence. The passivity of the noun is thus replaced by the transitive nature of the verb: has remained an influential presence in Spain for over sixty years. In addition to his Ta.pies is not a painter, rather he paints; and by doing so he opens up fissures in our work as an artist, his numerous activities and initiatives (for example, he founded perception of a seamless world. His canvas is the sheet of paper, the skin through one of Barcelona's most active art centers) keep his name in the spotlight, public which we, the viewers, might experience the world and tease out our relationships to acclaim that has often masked his art. As a result, the discourse around his work it. Thus the action of writing constitutes the limitless ineffable element found in this has been reduced to cliche. More interested in responding to larger and more gen heterodox tradition of modernism. In contrast to works defined by Socialist Realism, eral issues than to those relating specifically to his own work, he has been relatively a popular narrative form of the 1940s and 1950s, Tapies's painting can never be silent with regard to his painting and, with the exceptions of his theoretical texts described as illustrative. Instead, his painting is political in its poetics. As Jacques "Communication on the Wall," "Nothing Is Mean," and "Art against Aesthetics," he Ranciere alleges, works of art are annunciations that transform our perception of has not offered sufficient keys to an understanding of his practice. the world. The more artistic they are the more political they are.
What is unique about the work of Ta.pies? Why does it still continue to attract us? For Ta.pies, art is intrinsically linked to magic-magic more akin to the illusions con First, perhaps, because his paintings do not conform to any canon. To describe them jured by a fairground magician, however, than the shamanic rites invoked by Joseph as Abstract Expressionist or lnformalist is imprecise. It represents an attempt to view Beuys. Nonetheless, Ta.pies is aware of the cynicism of an era in which classifica the work through concepts that the artist had rejected by the time he had produced tion devours all and in which creative work is located at the center of our economic his mature work (the so-called matter paintings). While it is true that his acknowl system. In his practice, there is no room for the Romantic idea of the artist as demi edged references originate in Miro and Picasso and that his elective affinities are urge, as the possessor of universal and transcendent truths. The artist's attempt to found in Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell, Ta.pies belongs by age and attitude to a bring about political change has been defeated time and again in the modernist era. generation in which the mark of the ephemeral and the use of writing is fundamental. Ta.pies knows that art is trickery, and what is important is not the final result but the Although he expounds opinions that contradict the views expressed here, a position game itself, the emotional relationship established between artist and viewer through that undoubtedly results from particular historical contexts, such as that of Spain the object. Herein lies the mystery of the artistic act; and that unmentionable secret under Franco, his work engages the fringes of the modernist legacy. While modernist allows us to exist or coexist with no functional requirements or imposed identities. painting was fundamentally nonnarrative, antirhetorical, flat, and painterly, Tapies's art is based in narrative and delights in rhetorical devices; it does not respect the Manuel Borja-Villel, Director, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid l
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site map 15 Gran marr6 i fusta (Large Brown and Wood), 1975 Antoni Tapies was born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1923, into a family of booksellers Mixed media on wood and Catalan nationalist politicians. During protracted periods of illness in his 1051/a x 783/4 inches (267 x 200 cm) Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid adolescence, he began drawing and developing a serious interest in liter ature . In 1944, after abandoning law studies at Bar celona University, he began to work as 16 Gran llit-porta (Large Bed-Door), 1972 Mixed media on wood an artist. Ta.pies first exhibited his work in the late 1940s and had his first so lo 1085/15 x 1297/a inches (275 x 330 cm) exhibition in 1950 at Galeries Laietanes, Barcelona, and his first New York solo Fundaci6n Telefonica; long-term loan to Museo Nacional exhibition in 1953 at Martha Jackson Gallery. He first traveled abroad to Paris in Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid 1951, where he met Pablo Picasso, and in 1953 he visited New York, where he met 17 Diptic de vernis (Varnish Diptych), 1984 Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Hans Hofm ann. In 1984, he Mixed media on canvas 865/a x 2133/a inches (220 x 542 cm) established the Antoni Ta.pies Foundation in Barcelona. Retrospective surveys of his Fundaci6 Antoni Ta.pies, Barcelona work have been presented at such venues as the Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanno ver, Germany (1962), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1962), and the Kunsthaus Zurich (1962), the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna (1968), Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1973), Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (1977), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1980), Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dus seldorf (1989), and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2000). In 1993, Ta.pies and Cristina Iglesias represented Spain at the 45th Venice Biennale. Ta.pies lives and works in Barcelona.
Bibliography, arranged chronologically Cirici, Alexandre. Tapies: Witness of Silence . Barcelona: Edicions Polfgrafa SA, 1972. The 2004 documentary A. T Alfabet Tapies,directed by Daniel Hernandez, wil l be shown in the screening room during the course of the exhibition. Please see Penrose, Roland. Tapies. New York: Rizzoli, 1978. www.diaart.org or inquire at the admissions desk for a schedule. Franzke, Andreas. Tapies. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1992.
Borja-Villel, Manuel J., "By Way of Introduction: A Conversation with Antoni Ta.pies."In Antoni This exhibition, "Antoni Ta.pies:The Resources of Rhetoric," curated by Manuel Borja-Villel, is the Tapies: New Paintings. New York: Pace Wildenstein, 1995, pp. 7-13. first in a series of institutional exhanges planned between Dia Art Foundation, New York, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Soffa, Madrid. Tapies: El tatuatge i cos: Papers, cartons, i collages. Barcelona: Fundaci6 Antoni Ta.pies,1998. Texts by Xavier Antich, Manuel J. Borja-Villel, and Peter Burger.
This exhibition is made possible in part through the generosity of the State Corporation for Tapies. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Soffa, 2000. Texts by Manuel J. Spanish Cultural Action Abroad (SEACEX) and the Spanish Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Borja-Villel, Alexander G. Duttman, Antoni Ta.pies,and John C. Welchman. Cooperation and Culture, and PaceWildenstein. Tapies. In Perspective. Barcelona: ACTAR, in collaboration with Museu d'Art Contemporani de
Cover: Barcelona, 2004. Texts by Valeriano Bozal, Serge Guilbaut, Antoni Ta.pies,and John Yau, with Gran marr6 i fusta (Large Brown and Wood), 1975 an introduction by Manuel J. Borja-Villel.