Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World | Museu Tàpies

The solo exhibition The Imagination of the World proposes a revision of the work of Antoni Tàpies based on ideas found in his earliest period of production. With Tàpies as the centre of the project, the exhibition seeks to map out a network of relationships between active agents, discourses and practices, as related to two key areas: on the one hand, the complex assimilation of artistic tendencies—such as dada and surrealism—and currents of thought—psychoanalysis, Marxism—in Barcelona in that period; on the other hand, the dialogue of these movements with various forms of the vernacular tradition of popular culture. The curatorial selection of works will focus on the period from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s, while also suggesting other possible areas of continuity or rupture over the following decades.

The exhibition takes its title from an essay written by the artist at the end of his life, where ideas related to inter-disciplinarity and interculturality play a significant role. Basing itself on theoretical positions that seek to go beyond art history and the biographical model, the exhibition will feature a multiplicity  of aesthetic objects with diverse origins, with a three-fold aim: first, to broaden the genealogies of Tàpies ’world towards less habitual references, analysing texts and images as well as contexts and imaginary realms; second, to raise concerns in relation to various current debates on the academy, primitivist modes, the body, nature or the spectacle, amongst others, and third, to critically revive those considerations that allow us to keep conceiving new ways of being in the world.

· Exhibition: Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World 

· Dates: 13.02.2025 – 25.01.2026

· Curators: Imma Prieto, director of the Museu Tàpies, and Pablo Allepuz, curator of the Museu Tàpies collection.

· Museum: Museu Tàpies, Barcelona, Catalonia

· Press Conference: February 12, 2025, at 11:00 a.m.

· Opening: February 13, 2025, at 7:00 p.m.

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[Image: Antoni Tàpies. Paisatge transformat, 1947. Private collection, Barcelona © Comissió Tàpies / VEGAP, 2025]

Open Your Eyes | Les Abattoirs

For the first time, Les Abattoirs, Musée - Frac Occitanie Toulouse and the Galerie Le Château d’Eau are inviting visitors on a journey through their rich yet little-known photographic heritage. The exhibition presents a wide selection of photographic works from the collections of these two public art institutions, documenting major periods in the history of photography and its artists since the early twentieth century, while at the same time revealing the collections’ two, quite separate histories.

Since their creation, the public holdings of these two institutions have grown in keeping with an artistic approach specific to their respective characters. One – an art institution created in 2000 that brings together a museum and a Regional Fund for Contemporary Art (FRAC) – is devoted to modern and contemporary art. The other – founded in 1974 by photographer Jean Dieuzaide – is an iconic centre for modern and contemporary photography in the city of Toulouse (Tolosa de Llenguadoc, Occitanie).

This exhibition, which is being held at Les Abattoirs, offers visitors the unprecedented opportunity to view a broad range of photographic works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, revealing the connections between not only major artists but also lesser-known artists to be discovered or rediscovered, including Hans Bellmer, Claude Batho, Gaël Bonnefon, Mohamed Bourouissa, Brassaï, Sophie Calle, Denis Darzacq, Jean Dieuzaide, Robert Doisneau, Ralph Gibson, Laura Henno, Ouka Leele, Robert Mapplethorpe, Gina Pane, Agnès Varda, Gisèle Vienne and Sabine Weiss.

These intersecting perspectives also highlight the medium’s diverse techniques and its many aesthetic possibilities, from documentary photography to personal portraits, archives, installations and even photojournalism, all of which provide the conditions for a fresh appreciation of the role of the viewer.

The photographs, along with installations and a selection of artist’s books and rare publications from the extensive libraries of both institutions, form a path that introduces several themes, designed to bring out points of convergence between the two collections while also playing on the singularities of each.

From spontaneous snaps to staged images, from graphic or even abstract research to considerations of the body or space and from questions of identity to assertions of subjectivity and the exploration of narrative possibilities, this rich ensemble of almost 300 works represents a critical appraisal of the nature and potential of photography.

This exhibition is funded by the Neuflize OBC Foundation.

Open Your Eyes
The Photographic Collections of Les Abattoirs and the Galerie Le Château d’Eau
11.10.2024 - 18.05.2025

Les Abattoris, Tolosa de Llenguadoc, Occitanie

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[Image: Gilbert Garcin, "Changer le Monde", s.d., tirage baryté, 40 x 50 cm, Collection Galerie du Château d'Eau, Toulouse.]

Antoni Tàpies. The Practice of Art | Museu Tàpies

Within the framework of the centenary of the birth of Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012), the exhibition The Practice of Art presents a synthesis of the research and development of the artist over eight decades of intense production. From his first works of the 1940s to those finished months before his death, 

Tàpies continually experimented with all types of supports, techniques and materials, freeing himself from the constraints of academic tradition. His drawings, collages, paintings, objects and sculptures, made of paper, cardboard, wood, marble dust, varnish or bronze among many other elements, propose new aesthetic ways of addressing the contemporary world, from a perspective based on matter and existence. Thanks to numerous loans from public institutions and private collections, both national and international, this retrospective constitutes one of the largest surveys of his work to date.

Following the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels and the Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid, the final presentation of The Practice of Art takes as its starting point the memory contained in the space of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, now Museu Tàpies. Reflecting on some projects that have marked the institution’s history, the exhibition presents a non-linear journey through the artist’s career, articulated around different environments that establish relationships beyond chronology. 

When Tàpies states, for example, ‘I began painting eyes and I will end up painting eyes!’, he seems to be referring precisely to the cyclical or spiral time that imbues the whole of his work, in which motifs, materials and formats are repeated over the years, always with relevant differences. More than each individual work, it is the multiple links between the works – latent from the moment of their creation in the studio and recovered when exhibited together – that offer keys to understanding the complexity and relevance of Tàpies’ artistic practice.

The practice of art
20.07.2024 – 12.01.2025
Museu Tàpies, Barcelona

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The Zen Imprint | Antoni Tàpies | Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona

This exhibition will focus on Antoni Tàpies’ interest in the work of certain Japanese monks from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who helped spread the teachings of Zen Buddhism, and who developed a critical attitude and a willingness to upset conventional values – including those of artistic practice – such as Hakuin, Sengai, Jiun, Torei and Rengetsu. The exhibition will show how Tàpies integrated into his language, and into his own strand of the Western tradition, many of the attitudes, images and techniques that these artists used. It was never a process of mimesis, but rather the assimilation of a way of working, and also of a vision of the world that the Japanese tradition has preserved in temples and gardens, poems and calligraphy, ceramics and paintings.

This influence is evident in Tàpies’ works from the 1970s, and especially from the 1980s, when he recovered the brushstroke, which he had previously abandoned in his working practice, associating it with inscriptions, writing and ideograms. From that moment on, his paintings became less wall-like and closer to drawing. The exhibition at the Fundació will bring together a selection of works – including paintings, ceramics and drawings from the Collection’s fonds, together with national and international loans – that will show how Tàpies’ approach to Japanese art left its mark on his work.

Exhibition:

The Zen Imprint
13.12.2023 – 23.06.2024

Fundació Antoni Tàpies museum

Carrer Aragó, 255

Barcelona, Catalonia, EU

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[Image: Antoni Tàpies. Trio, 1994. © Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona/vegap. Photography: © Daniel Solano, Fundació Antoni Tàpies museum, Barcelona, 2023.]

A navigation of memory | Jen Orpin | Jarilager Gallery, Seoul

Orpin creates beautiful paintings of motorway bridges that mark well-travelled roads across the UK. She captures the essence of everyday topographies, choosing the framed view from the car to encapsulate memories and feelings of nostalgia. The composition of what she calls her “standard, straight-on landscapes” often feature a vertiginous perspective, where a solitary bridge soars into the sky, cutting through the air with surgical precision, as the eye travels along the road under and beyond its physical boundaries. 

The paintings embrace complementary notions of time: viewers are suspended between the impulse to dash at motorway speed and the pull of deceleration, emanating from the sturdy structures that dominate the scene. Concrete and metal give these brutalist landmarks, marked with graffiti and occasional weeds, the enduring quality of a monument. Each bridge acts as a focal point, confronting us with its imposing presence and forcing us to re-enact all the memories and emotions that we associated with its sight on our routes to the people and places that mean the most to us.

Exhibition

A navigation of memory
Jen Orpin

April 12, 2024 - May 11, 2024

Opening: Friday April 12th at 6:00 - 8:00 PM

Jarilager Gallery
12, Eonju-ro 165-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul
서울 강남구 언주로 165길 12
+82-10-8191-5834

Wednesday to Saturday: 13:00 – 18:00 PM
Sunday to Monday: by appointment only

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Le temps de Giacometti (1946–1966) | Les Abattoirs, Tolosa de Llenguadoc

The exhibition Le temps de Giacometti (1946–1966) [Giacometti's years], held at Les Abattoirs (Tolosa de Llenguadoc) co-organised with the Fondation Giacometti, gives visitors an unprecedented look at the art and life of artist Alberto Giacometti in the context of the post-war years up until his death in 1966.

The artistic journey of Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966), an iconic twentieth-century artist, was quite unique. In the 1920s he joined the Cubist movement, then in its closing years, before going on to become the embodiment of the ultimate Surrealist sculptor. After World War II however, as abstraction was gaining ascendancy on both sides of the Atlantic, he held to his own approach (which he shared with a few others) – that of figurative art. His was an extraordinary path. He was greatly esteemed for his famous portrayals of humankind, both wounded and undergoing change; he was in tune with existentialist thought; and he was the creator of an art that reflected recent history with its war, massacres and anxiety over the nuclear threat.

He was a humanist, totally absorbed in his work, but he was also a man of his time, a social creature whose creative work must be read in the various contexts that surrounded him: the circle of artists, writers and philosophers he frequented, the younger generation that visited him, the photographers that took his picture, and the galleries he exhibited in and for which he developed the staging design, such as at the Galerie Maeght in 1951. This exhibition aims to bring to the fore all these aspects, which came together in his response to the great artistic and philosophical questions of his time, from late Surrealism to the beginnings of Existentialist thought.

The exhibition is primarily composed of works loaned by the Fondation Giacometti, which preserves artworks that the artist retained throughout his life. It brings together some one hundred emblematic works such as Women with Chariot (ca. 1945), The Cage (1950), Walking Man II (1960), and Tall Woman I (1960), as well as a collection of paintings, drawings on magazines, photographs and archival material, thus creating a vast account of the artist as a key actor in the post-war world, through his artworks, connections with the intellectual and artistic world of the time, exhibitions and writings.

In a continuation of the exhibition, a contemporary section generates encounters between Giacometti and artists of today, around the action of the “Walking Man”, exploring its downfalls but also the hope it continues to hold. With works from: Pilar Albarracin, Claude Cattelain, Esther Ferrer, Regina José Galindo, Mona Hatoum, Rebecca Horn, Hiwa K, Kubra Khademi, Éric Pougeau, José Alejandro Restrepo.

In addition to the main exhibition, E.R.O.S (1959): The Story of a Surrealist Exhibition through the Daniel Cordier Collection takes visitors on a journey to the eighth Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme, which was presented in Cordier’s gallery in 1959 and in which Alberto Giacometti participated. 

An exhibition co-organised with the Fondation Giacometti.

About Fondation Giacometti

The Fondation Giacometti is a private foundation of public utility created in 2003. It is the universal legatee of Annette Giacometti, the artist's widow, and owns the world's largest collection of works by Alberto Giacometti, with nearly 10,000 works and objects. Based in Paris, it is directed by Catherine Grenier, general curator of heritage and art historian.

The Giacometti Foundation aims to protect, disseminate and promote the work of Giacometti. It organises exhibitions, grants loans in France and abroad, and organises the authentication committee for the artist's works. The Giacometti Institute is the current exhibition space of the Giacometti Foundation, which is also dedicated to art history research and education.

Exhibition with the support of the City of Toulouse / Toulouse Métropole.

Exhibition:

Le temps de Giacometti (1946-1966) 

[Giacometti's years]

22.09.2023 - 21.01.2024

Les Abattoirs, Musée - Frac Occitanie Toulouse
76 allées Charles de Fitte - Tolosa de Llenguadoc

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[Israel Shenker, "Alberto Giacometti in his exhibition, Galerie Maeght", 1951, photographie Fondation Giacometti © D.R. / Alberto Giacometti, "Walking Man II", 1960, Plaster – 188.5 x 29.1 x 111.2 cm ; Fondation Giacometti © Succession Alberto Giacometti Adagp, Paris 2023].

Roman Ondak. Infinitum | Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona

Roman Ondak’s practice brings together various methodologies, from simply formulated situations in which he binds relationships between members of his family, various groups of people or spectators entering his exhibitions, to modified found objects or constructed spatial installations. Space and time are often systematically thematised in his works and intertwined with his personal history, bearing fragments of his memories of the years he spent as a child and teenager in relatively isolated Czechoslovakia during the autocratic communist regime.

Ondak grew to understand society’s attempt to order existence through divisions and classifications of inclusion and exclusion. This structure’s failure is what the artist questions in his work by revealing the potential of other orders, other patterns of behaviour, and, ultimately, alternative social and political possibilities. The impression that his work often gives, of reality having been slightly adjusted, is in part a tactical replication of the propagandist alterations of image and statement that were an everyday fact of life for the artist while growing up.

The exhibition Roman Ondak. Infinitum plays between fiction and reality. Reality, which is informed by the artist’s personal experiences from the past while he grew in a society where reality was partially experienced as a fiction. The sculptures, spatial installations and photographs in this exhibition pay tribute to the everyday. The ready-made or constructed objects or situations depicted alternate between what they were while they were still part of reality and now, when they are shifted to subtly fictionalised forms confronting a viewer.

Roman Ondak (Žilina, Slovakia, 1966; lives and works in Bratislava)

Roman Ondak. Infinitum

12.05.2023 – 23.11.2023

Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona

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