Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World

The Museu Tàpies presents the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World.

How is life being thought on? Which imaginaries stimulate the Tapian legacy? The ars combinatoria, a Lullian idea, is based on the ability to combine different knowledge and wisdom. This idea becomes a metaphor for this exhibition when it comes to thinking and relating to the different elements.

In his book The Places of Art (1999), the artist proposed a vision of cultural history that connected, in words and especially images, the avant-garde art of the twentieth century favoured by the Western canon with a multitude of objects from other times and places. Following a similar methodology, this exhibition—which takes its name from one of the first essays in the book—explores the origins of Tàpies’ aesthetic-political positioning based on the ideas contained in his early work of the 1940s and ’50s. In Barcelona at that time, the complex assimilation of artistic currents (Dada, Surrealism) and thought (psychoanalysis, Marxism), as well as the dialogue that these movements established with different forms of popular culture, contributed to the development of an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach that would accompany him for the rest of his career.

In its initial presentation, the exhibition combines work by Antoni Tàpies, objects from the artist’s personal collection and a wide repertoire of period documents. These materials aim to expand the genealogies of Tàpies’ universe toward less familiar references and to review certain issues of his time regarding academicism, primitivisms, the body, the spectacle and the object, among others. In order to problematise the double singular of ‘The Imagination of the World’, the project will be gradually modified with the addition of other historical and contemporary voices, positioning the figure of Tàpies as the central node of a broader network of relationships between agents, discourses and practices, allowing us to continue imagining new ways of being in the world.

The project is completed with the exhibition booklet, which includes texts by the curators, Imma Prieto and Pablo Allepuz; a selection of texts of the period by Salvador Aulestià, Joan Brossa, Carlos Edmundo de Ory and Ramón D. Faraldo. Coinciding with this exhibition, the Museu Tàpies will republish the complete essays by the artist, which will go on sale in April.

The education programme includes a family day with educational activities for all stages of learning and for teachers, a drawing contest and a reading group. The public programme will further consolidate two initiatives launched in 2024: the international seminar on Antoni Tàpies, devoted this year to the presence of popular culture, psychoanalysis and primitivism in the artist’s career, and study days on his Sèrie Teresa (Teresa Series, 1966) and Cartes per a la Teresa (Letters for Teresa, 1974), which will also be collected in a book to be published in 2026.