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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The point of sculpture | Fundació Joan Miró

The Point of Sculpture offers an overview of the practice of modern and contemporary sculpture from an asynchronous, heterogeneous perspective that also includes older pieces and anonymous objects. The exhibition, arising from the ambition of twentieth-century sculpture to move beyond representing and generating images, also aims to show the major transformation of this discipline in the twenty-first century with the implementation of new techniques and the emergence of new imaginaries and sensibilities.

The exhibition illustrates how sculpture has held a tense dialogue with reality over the course of its history, capturing objects, bodies and narratives, and how it continues to have ties to the earliest expressions of the urge to sculpt. Accordingly, close to one hundred pieces selected by David Bestué are presented in seven spaces and address issues such as the copy and representation of reality, experimentation with materials, the exploration of the physical properties of sculpture, the relationship between the object and the subject, the relationship of sculpture with time, as well as the representation of the human figure and the expression of complex emotions such as sexual desire.

The show begins with the time prior to modernity, but focuses primarily on the period spanning from the early twentieth century until today, featuring artists such as Antoni Gaudí, Julio González, Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, Apel·les Fenosa, Lygia Clark, On Kawara, Robert Smithson, Bruce Nauman, David Medalla, Eva Lootz, Susana Solano, Pipilotti Rist and Wolfgang Tillmans, among others.

The Spanish title of the exhibition, El sentido de la escultura, evolved from the essays by the Peruvian poet and linguist Mario Montalbetti in which he defends the concept of 'sentido' literally, as a notion closer to the expression of a direction than to the honing down of a meaning.

Curated by David Bestué, in collaboration with Martina Millà

The point of sculpture
15/10/2021 — 06/03/2022

Fundació Joan Miró
Parc de Montjuïc

Barcelona, Catalunya

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BUNKER | Manera Dance & A. Martínez | Fundació Tàpies

This show takes as its starting point a questioning of existence and the place human beings occupy in the universe. Removed from their roots, protected by an artificial world, human beings seek security and the meaning of life, positioning themselves in a collective delirium, over and above everything that surrounds them. And yet, they are forever enslaved to their minds, something that distorts their vision and understanding of the world, while feeding false expectations and insecurities. Humans forget that survival often depends on actions that go beyond mere existence, and that they are not the beginning or the end of anything, but a small part of a cosmic dance.

Much of Antoni Tàpies work and ideas addresses philosophical questions related to existence. Tàpies saw reality as a whole in which the individual is part of the universe and the body is never separate from space. In an attempt to fight nature’s antagonistic, hostile and conquering character, he defended the need for identity and collaboration. Influenced by Buddhism, he advocated a unifying view of the universe and all the beings that are part of it.

Bunker is an artistic proposal and the first solo work by the dancer and choreographer Aleix Martínez (Barcelona, 1992) together with the ManNera Dansa company (Hamburg). Aleix Martínez made his debut as a choreographer in 2012 with Trencadís, a work created for the Deutsches SchauSpielHaus, Hamburg, for which he received the Tanz Award in the category of ‘Young Talent’. Since then, he has collaborated independently with various festivals, institutions and companies, creating Le Surrealisme, c’est moi, 2014, for the Sant Pere de Rodes Festival; Orígens, 2015, for the Gong Festival; and Horizons, 2018, a humanitarian project in support of Open Arms. In 2019 he was commissioned to represent the Hamburg Ballet in London with Seelen Spiel, a work especially produced for the reopening of the newly-refurbished Linbury Theatre. Shakespeare Sonnets, his first work for the Hamburg Ballet, was premiered in July 2019, opening the 45th edition of the Hamburger Ballett-Tage annual festival.

Artistic information

Concept and choreography: ManNera Dansa and Aleix Martínez.
Dramaturgy: Montserrat Prats.
Interpreter: Aleix Martínez.
Sound: The Golden Record-Voyager.
Photography: Borja Bermúdez
Costumes: N.O.N.
Acknowledgments: PoolHaus-Blankenese Foundation in Hamburg.

Fundació Antoni Tàpies

Carrer Aragó, 255

Barcelona, Catalonia

Dates: Friday 11 February 2022, and Saturday 12 February 2022, at 20.00 h.

Buy tickets: 11 February 2022 | 12 February 2022

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Sensible Grounds: Inhale | Tabatabai & Afrassiabi | Fundació Tàpies

Inhale (2016-2021) is an archive of fictional narratives and sounds that trace opium smoke in the junction of writing and breath. The narratives are written passages that chronicle instances of opium use in Iranian modern and contemporary novels and short stories from the 20th and 21st centuries. Each passage is a miniature scene of social interaction, with opium as the central agent. Read together, they imply a genealogy of opium smoking channelled through various characters, objects and situations, mobilised to inhale, pass on, filter and navigate the smoke. A number of sculptural objects produced for the iteration at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies extend this genealogy and the figure of ‘passage’. They hold an algorithmically produced archive of sounds that simulate the sound of breathing as it is affected by the continuous inhalation of opium smoke. Opium smoke enters the lung and the deposition of carbon dust in the airways affects the sound of breathing, increasing the probability of crackles and wheezes in the airways.

Along the installation by Tabatabai and Afrassiabi there is the projection of Night of The Hunchback (1964) by Farrokh Ghaffari and Thicker Than Paint Thinner (2011) by Babak Afrassiabi. While in Inhale opium smoke flows from one scene to another, permeating the human narratives and setting forth its own forms of sociality, the films on display expand on notions of passage, residue, and ‘chronic’ states, in the context of embodied histories and necro-poetics.

Thicker Than Paint Thinner is based on the true story of a former drug addict-turned-revolutionary who sets fire to a cinema in Iran, a few months before the culmination of the 1979 revolution, unwittingly causing the death of nearly 400 people. Ironically, the film being screened at the time of the fire was the The Deer (1974), featuring a drug addict who becomes involved in political activism and eventually dies in a gun battle with the police. While the character in The Deer succeeds in dying for his cause, Afrassiabi’s protagonist is forsaken by the post-revolutionary establishment, even when he wants to give himself up and pleads to be punished. Adapted from a story in One Thousand and One Nights, Night of The Hunchback focuses on the last night in the life of an actor in a traditional comedy theatre troupe, who after a performance in the residence of a wealthy couple, accidentally chokes to death on their food. Attempts to dispose of his body, passes it through various strands of the society, unintentionally bringing into contact remote characters and dubious activities. At the end of the film, the police officer thanks the dead hunchback for exposing the underbelly of the city.

The artists Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi have collaborated since 2004. They also publish a bilingual (Farsi and English) magazine called Pages, which is edited parallel to the ongoing topical lines of their projects. Issue 10 of the magazine, ‘Inhale’, was printed and published recently. In 2018, they launched an online platform pagesmagazine.net, which expands the magazine’s editorial focus. They often extend their work from unresolved historical narratives that demand forms of approach that are materially, temporally and aesthetically undecidable. Their recent projects are concerned with making speculative junctures between history, archive, technology and the practice of art.

The ongoing multi-chaptered program Sensible Grounds, curated by Azar Mahmoudian brings together moving image practices including sculptural installations, archival material, films that test fiction and other conventions, sometimes even dispensing with images entirely. It thinks through the continuity of intergenerational time and memory and the apparent repetitions of contemporary political struggles. It attempts to understand such chronic experiences neither as pathological loopholes, nor as pre-emptive absorptions of these struggles by the constancies of history. It approaches the chronic as stretched and dilated time. Borrowing the term ‘chronic’ from the drug culture, Elisabeth Freeman brilliantly rearticulates the ‘chronic’ states as a tearing apart of dominant temporalities of the linear, a condition in which multiple and varied presences and rhythms are possible. In this way, intergenerational time and memory could become holding grounds for concurrent and synchronised desires.

Recent iterations of the programme include That’s How We Undo It, at Lux, London; and Tuning into the Rhythms of the Chronic at Nida Art Colony. It is presented as part of the European Cooperation project 4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture, co-funded by Creative Europe.

Sensible Grounds: Inhale

Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi

  
Exhibition and film screenings curated by Azar Mahmoudian
Fundació Antoni Tàpies museum, Barcelona, Catalonia

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