EXHIBITIONS IN ANTONI TÀPIES FOUNDATION

ALLORA & CALZADILLA

The severe climatic vulnerability and massive debt extraction suffered by the island of Puerto Rico can hardly be ignored as it gives a political sense to the works of Allora & Calzadilla.

For this exhibition at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, the first with a monographic character in the Spanish state, Allora & Calzadilla present a selection of works produced between 1996 and 2017.

The musical dimension of these pieces indicates to the viewers that here, quite possibly, the visual is subordinated to the auditory. One work leads the visitor to another, so that Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on “Ode to Joy” for Prepared Piano of 2008 can lead indistinctly to the wall from which Wake up sounds of 2007 or to the upper floor in which Hope Hippo 2005 can be perceived thanks to the alerts of a whistle.

The composition of Allora & Calzadilla calls for a multiplicity of ways of being in the world, forms of existence that refer to the human and the animal, the organic and the mineral. For these artists, the acoustic represents an uninterrupted expansion that challenges the perimetral conception of the museum space.

A catastrophe that reveals that the economic deficit is also a reflection of a democratic deficit, the same one that keeps Puerto Rico under a covert colonial regime. An ambitious work such as Puerto Rican Light (Cave Winds), commissioned and installed by Dia Art Foundation in Guayanilla-Peñuelas and that has closed weeks before opening this exhibition, is introduced in the Fundació Antoni Tàpies without a physical material presence. He does it through a debate and a conversation that turn the work into a rumor. A work that is spoken without having seen it.

ANTONI TÀPIES. T DE TERESA 

Antoni Tàpies met Teresa Barba at the end of the 1940s. At that time she was still very young. A few years before he had lost his mother and had to take care of his five brothers, while taking care of his father. All this gave him an unusual maturity and humanity for someone his age.

During the artist’s stay in Paris the 1950-1951 biennium they exchanged an intense and frequent correspondence that united them through intimate links. When they returned from Paris they formalized their relationship and in October 1954 Antoni Tàpies and Teresa Barba got married in Barcelona.

The presentation of the series of drawings Sèrie Teresa (Teresa Series, 1966) together with the series of lithographs, lithocollages and collages Cartes per a la Teresa (Letters for Teresa, 1974) pay tribute to the relationship of the two. These works celebrate a private language, accessible only to those who used it. The two blocks of work display a repertoire of signs without translation for the spectators. All a gesture that preserves the intimacy of the couple despite the explicit allusions to domesticity and shared sexuality.

Two exhibitions that will allow you to delve into the work of one of the most important Catalan artists of the twentieth century and an artistic vision of the difficulties suffered by the island of Puerto Rico.