MADRID.- The Madrid Museo Starting this Wednesday, Reina Sofa hosts a major retrospective of the prolific artist Catalan Antoni Tpies, with construction from public and private collections around the world, to commemorate the centenary of his birth.
The samplewhich goes chronologically from his beginnings as a self-taught artist to his last decades, with more experimental works with death and illness as recurring themes, will be open to the public until June.
“It is truly a party, it is the largest retrospective ever held on the Catalan artist, with more than 220 works,” said the director of the Reina Sofia, Manuel Segade, at a press conference.
Before reaching the museum in the Spanish capital, a reduced version of the exhibition passed through the Belgian cultural center Bozar last year. Later, in July, arrive at the Antoni Tpies Foundation in Barcelona.
The retrospective begins with the first works of Tpies, born in Barcelona in 1923 and who began his career as a self-taught artist copying paintings by Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso while convalescing from a lung illness at the age of 19.
These first rooms exhibit self-portraits and paintings with fantastic qualities, but also the series of drawings “Natural History”, a reflection on the world around him that he made when he had already come into contact with the international avant-garde in Paris, where he lived thanks to a scholarship.
Soon Tpies began to produce the works for which he is perhaps best known, abstract paintings made with different techniques, elements and textures, in mainly ocher, gray and black tones, with which he sought to “alter the traditional conception of the pictorial surface.” according to the press release of the exhibition.
Here it stands out Great paintinga painting on loan from the Guggenheim Museum made in 1958 with marble dust and sand on canvas, which with its deteriorated and torn surface resembles a wall worn by the passage of time.
“He is a painter who is not limited by a formalist, traditional, retrograde vision of painting, he is a painter for whom painting can be absolutely everything,” explained Manuel Borja-Villel, curator of the exhibition.
political commitment
The exhibition continues with its production in the 1960s and 1970s, when assemblages made with paper and cardboard predominated, along with various objects of daily life.
At this time we also see: “the politically committed artist, who begins to react against the dictatorship of (Francisco) Franco”, with works such as November 7due to the date in 1971 when the Assembly of Catalonia was created, an anti-Franco platform with a lot of popular support, Borja-Villel pointed out.
The last rooms cover the artist’s final decades, when he produced large works in which references to death and illness were very present.
“The retrospective is a wonderful opportunity to look at the legacy of (…) a prolific artist, without a doubt the most important of the second half of the 20th century in the Spanish and international context,” said Imma Prieto, director of the Antoni Tpies Foundation. .
Antoni Tpies i Barba, son of the artist who died in Barcelona in 2012, said he hopes that it will serve so that new generations: “and others who perhaps knew but only partially my father’s work, can rediscover it.”
FUENTE: AP
