"Tàpies lives. Tàpies lives." Tàpies Year begins

The Tàpies Year will vindicate the validity of the artist with four exhibitions at the Antoni Tàpies Foundation and dozens of activities. Tàpies is alive. Viu Tàpies will be the motto of this ephemeris, which will be celebrated between December 13, 2023 and December 13, 2024. The celebration will highlight the validity of the artist with a choral and international program that will add new voices to the story of Tàpies in the hands of new generations, and will project the Antoni Tàpies Foundation as an open space. Some of the voices that will nurture the new stories will be the filmmaker Albert Serra, the cultural journalist Rita Roig or the influencer Juliana Canet.

Tàpies is alive. Long live Tàpies.

The year 2023 will begin with the commemoration of the centenary of the birth of the artist Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012), an anniversary that the Fundació Antoni Tàpies will celebrate, from December 13, 2023 to December 13, 2024, with a series of exhibitions and activities around the artist's figure, work and legacy. The tribute will have Tàpies viu as its motto. Viu Tàpies aims to enhance the figure of the artist and delve deeper into various aspects of his work and his thinking, as well as to highlight its validity by emphasizing those aspects that challenge us today.

This celebration also wants to invite citizens and institutions to be part of it through a participatory choral program; to incorporate new voices into the story of Tàpies adding the views of the new generations, and to project the Fundació Antoni Tàpies as a space open to art and thought, being faithful to the artist's legacy and will. Therefore, we are working with the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA), the National Museum of Art of Catalonia (MNAC), the Gran Teatre del Liceu, the Filmoteca de Catalunya, the Suñol Foundation and the Victoria Foundation de los Ángeles, among others.

The Antoni Tàpies Foundation assumes the curatorship of the Year of Tàpies through a specific team dedicated to the event: Núria Homs, curator of the Foundation, is the curator of the Year of Tàpies; Judith Barnés is the coordinator; and an advisory committee formed by Manuel Borja-Villel, Pilar Cortada, Anna Saurí, manager of the Foundation, Clara Tàpies and Toni Tàpies, contribute to articulating a solid program of international projection. The entire Foundation team is working to develop it.

National and international program

The program will spread the figure and work of Antoni Tàpies on a national and international scale, while delving into various aspects of the artist, both his artistic side and his social and political commitment. From an interdisciplinary and current point of view, the Antoni Tàpies Foundation will become the nerve center of the commemoration, although the celebration also aims to cover the territory with the desire to bring the institution closer to the public. The activities of the ephemeris must allow the figure of the artist to be connected to the 21st century, while incorporating other voices and the perspective of new generations.

Exhibition projects

To honor the artist, the Foundation will produce a total of four exhibition projects: the Tàpies exhibition. The Japanese imprint, curated by Núria Homs, focused on the influence that some Japanese monks of the 18th and 19th centuries exerted on the artist's work as transmitters of the teachings of Zen Buddhism; the exhibition entitled A = A, B = B, curated by the artist and scientist Pep Vidal, takes Tàpies as a starting point to reflect on the connections that occur between art and science through the participation of artists born from the 1980s; the Sengai exhibition, which is being negotiated with the Idemit su Museum of Art in Tokyo with the intention of presenting paintings and calligraphy by the Japanese Buddhist monk Sengai (1750 – 1837), and the Antoni Tàpies exhibition. Retrospective [working title], a retrospective dedicated to the work of Antoni Tàpies curated by Manuel Borja-Villel and co-produced by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) and the Antoni Tàpies Foundation.

Collaborations

At the territorial level, the Foundation will collaborate with different cultural facilities in the country in order to reach other audiences and facilitate dialogue with other discourses. In this sense, although the Foundation will become the nerve center of the commemoration, work is being done on the organization of an exhibition of Tàpies posters at the Museum of the History of Catalonia and also a traveling informative exhibition, designed for the Library Service of the Generalitat de Catalunya. In terms of the educational proposal and the public program, the centenary will materialize in numerous activities that will address some of the artist's most prominent interests, such as cinema and music. So, the educational service of the Antoni Tàpies Foundation will deploy a program of activities for the 2023-2024 academic year that will give voice to the entire educational community and that will offer tools, resources and opportunities so that the educational centers of all the country they so wish, can join the Tàpies Year and spread the artist's work and thought to new generations.

The legacy of Tàpies and contemporaneity

Some of the planned actions are: an extensive educational day, which will take place throughout the school year to accompany learning processes based on the artist's work; an itinerant educational material, which will focus on the link that Tàpies had with the book as an object, work of art and source of knowledge, and a series of participatory actions, with the aim of making visible the work of the artist On the other hand, with the desire to find a balance between the memory, the legacy of Antoni Tàpies and contemporaneity, the Foundation will invite renowned professionals from the cultural sector and also emerging voices to assimilate a way of representing and interpreting the world and bring it to the present.

As a whole, the Tàpies Year will show the artist's work process in a transversal way, while delving deeper into his creative practice when building his own universe. It will also highlight his writing and thought, so that, beyond the plastic work, the references and affinities of the artist and the thought he left to the country, often little known, will be highlighted. In addition, we want to focus on Antoni Tàpies' interest in science, as a discipline that allows us to understand the world, due to his attention to Eastern philosophy, focusing on the interest that Tàpies had in cultures non-Western and the way these permeated his production. Simultaneously, his social commitment will be highlighted and how this attitude was maintained throughout his life. The contemporary look of Antoni Tàpies and his projection towards the future will be complemented by giving space to young creators and researchers who will work on the artist's knowledge and work.

The Tàpies Year will count on public and private collaboration as a guideline. In this sense, complicity will be generated in the relationship with public and private actors who can provide additional resources. The Antoni Tàpies Foundation is promoting the declaration of Event of Exceptional Public Interest for the Tàpies Year, to favor private sponsorships for the purposes of applying tax benefits.