Museu Tàpies

Conference I, You, World: Symbol and Universe
2025-09-30 18:00 - 20:30 (Europe/Madrid) | Museu Tàpies
Following on from the success of the first edition of the I, You, World: Symbol and Universe study days, held last year as part of the programme marking the centenary of the artist’s birth, the Museu Tàpies now presents the second and final edition of these study days. The aim is to delve into one of the most complex and essential aspects of Antoni Tàpies’ work: his ability to create a symbolic language that transcends material form and enters a realm that is both deeply personal and universally resonant.
By bringing together art theorists, poets and image specialists, those sessions spurred the development of fresh insights and multivoiced readings of Tàpies’ Sèrie Teresa [Teresa’s Series] (1966) and Cartes per a la Teresa [Letters to Teresa] (1974), two key works for understanding the dialogue between art, writing and existence in his career.
Tàpies’ oeuvre can be seen as a living essay that shapes a symbolic universe in which poetic vision and material form are in constant interplay. The focus on his Cartes per a la Teresa portfolio and Sèrie Teresa series brought to light the dialectic between sign and gesture, word and space, and the intersection of private life with the public construction of an artwork. This body of images and texts embodies an idea of art not merely limited to representation, but as an open process of exploration and symbolic creation, where each work becomes both meditation and communication extending beyond the artist himself.
The exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World, currently on view at the Museu Tàpies, presents a selection of twelve works from Cartes per a la Teresa. Building on research shared in these study days, the show offers visitors a rare opportunity to explore the intersection of love letters, collage and lithography, expressed through a language that fuses cosmic gestures with the intimacy of the everyday. This ensemble reflects Tàpies’ gift for decoding and reconstructing shared life experiences, transforming them into spaces rich in meaning and open to multiple interpretations.
In this spirit, the I, You, World: Symbol and Universe study days reaffirm the Museu Tàpies’ commitment to placing the artist’s work within an interdisciplinary framework that allows it to be understood as a meeting point of personal history, symbolic vision, politics and aesthetic reflection. This broader perspective reveals how Tàpies’ art transcends its historical and cultural origins to become a universal expression in which the relationship between sign and world expands into the creation of a new universe.

PROGRAMME

SESSION 1
Date: 30 September 2025
6 pm. Welcome and introduction by Imma Prieto
6.10 pm. Talk: “An Education by Stone”, by Pedro G. Romero
6.50 pm. Talk: “Visual Letters: Overflowing Language, Matter, Affection and Gesture”, by Andrea Soto Calderón
7.30 pm. Poetry reading: “Uneasy Peace”, by Blanca Llum Vidal
8 pm. Open floor for questions
8.30 pm. Closing remarks

SESSION 2
Date: 1 October 2025
6 pm. Introduction by Judith Barnés
6.10 pm. Talk: “Essays on Love Without History”, by Raül Garrigasait
6.50 pm. Poetry reading: “Rag Days: Sequentiality, Epistolarity, Abstraction, Tàpies and Millares”, by Eloy Fernández Porta
7.30 pm. Debate
8 pm. Closing remarks

[Image: Antoni Tàpies. Original model (1971) for the series of lithographs, lithograph-collages and collages Letters to Teresa, 1974. © Comissió Tàpies / VEGAP, 2025]

Link to the first edition of the conference.

Museu Habitat: II International Meeting Countering Abysses. Poetics of Scale 2025
2025-10-01 - 2025-10-04
With two years of experience, the Museu Habitat program has opened several spaces for reflection, exchange, production and experimentation around the history and current affairs of the museum institution. The Museu Habitat has been built as a protean organism that seeks to bring together different types of communities and generate non-consensual spaces. The task of mobilizing meetings and actions has been carried out by a diverse team of artists, curators, activists and managers, which includes the research and mediation collectives Entrar Afuera, IDRA and Transductores.
The set of initiatives deployed has been complemented by two meetings and an exhibition. The first meeting, “Which museum?”, held in May 2024, started from a question that represents the germ of the program: which museum is possible and desirable today? And in 50 years? The second, “Turning spells”, stated that today it is no longer possible to reflect on the institution exclusively from its own foundations, be they physical or conceptual. Thinking and acting only from what happens within this normative building leads to inevitable sensory and epistemological frustration. For its part, through more than 120 works, the exhibition “Fabular paisatges” reflected on how exhibition devices are constructed, which stories are privileged and which stories are silenced. In line with these two meetings and taking into account the polarization that Fabular paisatges aroused, the Habitat Museum opens a new moment of synthesis and possible reformulations based on the seminar “Contrariar abisms. Poetics of scale”.
In December 2024, an assembly was held at the CAP Gornal, organized by the Entrar Afuera collective and mediated by Ràdio Nikosia, in which social and institutional agents converged. In this assembly, the notion of vertigo was taken as a clinical space, of personal experience and institutional challenge, from which to rethink roles and provoke experiences. In this sense, the general impotence that we all feel in the face of war, inequality, racism, gender violence and the devastation of nature, seems to lead us irremediably into the abyss, but at the same time it calls us, definitively, to resistance. This is posed as an urgent need.
In this context, the Habitat Museum proposes a dynamic of work on multiple scales, ranging from micro to macro and vice versa, and which delves into the interstices, into undefined options, that is, into what is located between gesture and action, between the personal and the social, between discourse and affections.
“Contrariar abismes. Poetics of scale” unfolds from three conceptual axes: exhibiting, narrating, fable-making. Exhibiting and narrating are two of the intrinsic tasks of the museum and both work in constant interaction. The decisions about what and how is exhibited construct a story that can and must be questioned permanently. In turn, fable-making is thought of here as a way of imagining other forms of narrating, but also as an exercise in confrontation with what has been fabled.
In this sense, the meeting seeks to resume and open up questions, contradictions and proposals with the aim of generating escape routes that can give rise to the necessary transformative movements and the construction of other spaces and ways of doing things.

Download the programme.

New vinyl of the series Tàpies’ Chairs 2024
2025-10-08 18:00 - 19:00 | Museu Tàpies
The Museu Tàpies presents the vinyl curated from the first edition of the series Tàpies’ Chairs, a collection of sound actions that took place as part of Tàpies Year. The first edition of this multidisciplinary series, brought together proposals by artists who worked with voice, spoken word and oral memory, using the Tàpies universe as a starting point for performative experimentation.
Actions, developed as part of the centenary of the artist’s birth, were created specifically for the museum and displayed diverse languages, ranging from music to text and gesture to sound, from unique perspectives. The first edition of the Tàpies’ Chairs series included the participation of MUOM, Félix Denuit, Biel Mesquida, Itziar Okáriz, Cabosanroque, Joana Gomila, Bartolomé Ferrando, Blanca Llum Vidal and Los Sara Fontán, Hugo Gómez-Chao Porta, Amidea Clotet (Cicle Difraccions), Eduard Escoffet, Mal Pelo and Niño de Elche.
The publication of this record responds to the desire to give continuity and permanence to a project designed to be experienced live. Capturing part of it on a physical medium such as vinyl, allows you to listen from a more intimate place, while prolonging the evocative power of the sound performances. By doing this, the Museu Tàpies reaffirms the value of listening and the sound archive, as active forms of transmitting artistic memory.
As part of the presentation, there will be an audition of the vinyl and the presence of some of the guest artists. In addition, anyone who wants to purchase the vinyl on this occasion will enjoy a special price of 25 euros (the official price is 30 euros).
Within the framework of Càtedra Antoni Tàpies – UPF d’Art i Pensament Contemporanis.

Rhythm and Substances
2025-10-14 18:00 - 19:00
As part of the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World, the Museu Tàpies presents the third activation in the cycle A Hatch in the Void, a series of events conceived by writer Marc Caellas to activate the materials presented in the exhibition, highlighting the epochal spirit in which we find ourselves.
This time, Caellas invites guitarist and improviser Juanma Trujillo to share a poetry and music recital that revisits the spirit of the historic evenings of the Club 49, a group of artists and intellectuals who, in the forties and fifties, renewed the cultural scene in Barcelona with talks, recitals and avant-garde actions.
The duet will recall essential voices of 20th-century poetry, such as Carlos Edmundo de Ory, Joan Perucho, J. V. Foix and Juan Eduardo Cirlot, establishing a living dialogue between word and sound. Reading and music will make up a shared space for discovery and experimentation, true to the transgressive spirit that characterised the Club 49 and to the way Antoni Tàpies saw art: as a constant questioning and as a window on the world.
This event offers the audience an intimate, immersive experience, one that invites listening in a different way, letting oneself be surprised and inhabiting a space where poetry and music not only meet, but enrich one another.

Opening of the exhibition: Germaine Dulac. Je n’ai plus rien
2025-10-16 19:00 - 21:00
Opening of the exhibition Germaine Dulac. Je n’ai plus rien, curated by Imma Prieto, director of the Museu Tàpies, and Imma Merino, film critic and university professor. The event will take place on Thursday, October 16, 2025, at 7:00 p.m., at the Museu Tàpies (Carrer de Aragó, 255, Barcelona).
Germaine Dulac. Je n’ai plus rien is the first monographic exhibition dedicated to Germaine Dulac (Amiens, 1882 – Paris, 1942) in the catalan and spanish context. The exhibition is based on a selection of films, texts, and archival materials—some previously unpublished—that allow us to explore the complexity of the cinematographic work of this prominent filmmaker and theorist of the avant-garde art. It also introduces the viewer to French cinematic impressionism, close to a certain narrative cinema, and facilitates the analysis of the critical tensions toward the heteropatriarchal hierarchies of her time, as well as experimental and documentary cinema from the end of her career.
The exhibition revisits more than thirty years of her career and offers a rigorous reflection on cinema, image, and the vindication of the female figure. It also reminds us of the eternal return of history and constitutes a denunciation of the rise of nationalism and the far right.
The retrospective expands with a film programme at the Filmoteca de Catalunya (from October 1 to November 23) and with the publication of the book Germaine Dulac. ¿Qué es el cine? (Wunderkammer / Museu Tàpies, 2025), which brings together, for the first time in Spanish, the filmmaker’s writings and lectures.
Admission to the general opening is free and requires no prior reservation.

Venus Jasper: Weeping Swamp
2025-10-18 13:00 - 15:00
Multidisciplinary artist, Venus Jasper, weaves together a new live performance stemming from their ongoing research Wetlands Worship; an exploration of swamp sentiments, climate grief, queerness and sacred ecologies. Born from speculative fiction modalities of storytelling and narrative deconstruction, the sonic aspect of the performance includes many samples of water, insects and metal, paired with a noise machine and haunting vocals. This future-facing folklore speaks of a rotting, turbulent sea and a journey to a mythic swamp-island where decay is sacred and rage has its rituals.
The artist based in Amsterdam, NL has received travel support from the Mondriaan Fund and will develop the piece during a week-long residency at Graner; an experimental movement and dance center in Barcelona where they will also spend time to investigating and queering the legacy of the Aloja and the Encantades—water spirits in Catalan folklore.
Venus Jasper (they/he) is a queer visual artist, singer-performer, educator, writer and curator – currently based in Amsterdam. In their counter-cultural and ritualistic work they envision spirited and sensuous post-capitalisms that spell the decolonization of the Anthropocene, rekindle more-than-human kinship, and forward (neuro)-queer and trans-historic perspectives on ecology, folklore, contemporary culture, spirituality and the self.
A session within the framework of the 2nd edition of the “Following the Sun 2025” cycle, curated by Gabriel Virgilio Luciani.

Maladruà, with Estel Boada and Xavier Michel
2025-10-29 18:00 - 19:00 | Museu Tàpies
“Maladruà” is “maladroit.” It means “clumsy” in French. However, the interpretation of languages ​​and codes from different regions always plays a clumsy role when it comes to establishing immediate connections.
Estel Boada (Catalonia), singer and multidisciplinary artist, together with Xavier Michel (France), poetic performer of the absurd, will introduce us to the universe of André du Colombier through a perspective filled with humor, linguistic play, and experimentation with space.
The Maladruà activity is part of the RELÉ program of the ARTefACTe5 conference, a CLUB9 project promoting contemporary French performance. With the support of Espai nyamnyam.

Xavier Michel (Poitiers, 1990) holds a degree in Systems Engineering and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Villa Arson in Nice. For several years, he has developed a performative work in which he manipulates tool-sculptures in absurd and poetic productions. His practice draws on object theater, circus, dance, and music, giving rise to a polysemic and sensitive language. In recent months, he has been working in Barcelona, ​​where his work finds resonance and a certain affinity with the local art scene. He is currently in residency at Hangar-org.
Estel Boada (Barcelona, ​​1991), singer and multidisciplinary artist, defines herself as a contextual juggler. With a background in Fine Arts, she explores space, community, and voice through performance. Her work, marked by humor and absurdity with touches of fantasy, burlesquely reflects on her life as a “frustrated diva.” Interested in experimental education, contextual art, sound, music, and drawing, she uses action and humor as tools of critique. She has participated in numerous interdisciplinary art interventions and curated self-organized contemporary art series. She is also a composer and vocalist for various musical projects.

André du Colombier. A Lyrical Point of View. Installation view. Photo: Eva Guillamet

Leo Castro. Over half way
2025-10-30 19:00 - 19:30
“I always carry memory with me for a long time, in body and in thought, in any process of constructing a poetics or a fiction, which then end up being shared with lots of other strangers . . . Imagined landscapes, decisive conversations, those that are left halfway or unfinished because the thread leads somewhere else, the visual or drawn elements, I sketch them out. I talk about what’s left out but shapes the journey, which is no less beautiful than all that is finally validated.”
Revisiting thoughts and the body, with the space as a landscape, to recall the half of the way travelled so far.
Activity within the framework of the second edition of the action cycle The Chairs of Tàpies, led by Judith Barnés, head of public programs at the Tàpies Museum.

Leo Castro is an artist, performer and graduate in Philosophy from the University of Barcelona (1996). She trained as an actress from 1992 to 1996 at the Estudi Nancy Tuñón (Stanivslaski/Strasberg), and in dance in 1996, coming into contact with a range of contemporary techniques and creative talents: Benoît Lachambre, Ruth Zaporah, Mark Tompkins, Lisa Nelson, María Muñoz, Andrés Corchero, DD Dovilier and Julyen Hamilton, among others. In 1999 she founded Col·lectiu SIAMB, devoted to Improvisation and Contact Improvisation. She acts in productions by TVE, TV3, TVC and the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, as well as with the companies Senza Tempo, Sol Picó and Konic Thtr, and intermittently with the LaViuda company since 2002.
She began her partnership with the Mal Pelo company in 2004, and since then has worked with them as an actor and assistant director, as well as on audiovisual directing and creativity for the company’s stage and exhibition projects. She embarked on her own creative exploration in presenting the stage productions Amadou (2009) and Olivia (2012). In 2010 she started working with creative centre L’animal a l’esquena as head of videographic documentation of residency projects and the centre’s different artistic activities. From 2008 to 2016, together with Hermann Bonnin, she worked on productions for Teatro Español in Madrid, Teatre Nacional de Catalunya and La Seca / Espai Brossa, as movement director, stage director and acting coach. She worked as assistant director with the loscorderos.sc company on its pieces El mal menor, El cielo de los tristes and Ultrainocencia. Since 2013 she has worked as an audiovisual editor with film producer and distributor Fromzero. In 2015 she started teaching Performance Technique in Dance and Composition on the postgraduate course in Performing Arts at ERAM, University of Girona.

Segni mossi. PURPLE training
2025-11-08 - 2025-11-09
Segni mossi is a research project created by Alessandro Lumare (visual artist) and Simona Lobefaro (choreographer) that focuses on the relationship between dance – as a projection in space and the emergence of our emotional side – and drawing – as an extension of the body and action, and as a means to trace the essence of experiences.
In this event, Segni mossi is presenting its training PURPLE, which is aimed at teachers, artists, educators and all those interested in art and education. The artists say that this training “tastes of bungee jumping, light breeze, and earthquake”.
“We will be magnetic dances, attractive colours. We will stretch movements, release signs. We will bounce between tempera, bodies, and environments. We will be magma, pumice, lava. Invisible like the wind, we will lift leaves, trees, and buildings. We will be traces in the storm”.

Stretch and scatter. Workshop for families with Segni mossi
2025-11-08 10:30 - 12:30
Activity canceled

A workshop where bodies trace elastic trajectories and let themselves be carried by invisible forces. We’ll play with movements that stretch and return, then we’ll be swept away by the wind that moves objects, people and marks. An experience for families, between tension, lightness and sudden storms.
Segni mossi is a research project created by Alessandro Lumare (visual artist) and Simona Lobefaro (choreographer) that focuses on the relationship between dance – as a projection in space and the emergence of our emotional side – and drawing – as an extension of the body and action, and as a means to trace the essence of experiences.

"La Quema" [The Burning]: New documentary about Elena del Rivero’s creative journey
2025-11-14 18:00 - 20:00
As the climax of the second Extramural art project, Elena del Rivero. Transitar «La Quema» [Elena del Rivero: Transiting ‘The Burning’], the Museu Tàpies presents, as part of the programme of the Barcelona Loop Festival, the new documentary La Quema, produced by Impro Films, A Casa Do Pozo and The Paraclete, in collaboration with Mateo Feijóo, curator of the project Elena del Rivero: Transitar «La Quema».
The project La Quema follows Elena del Rivero’s journey and her earliest works, created in the seventies and eighties, from her studio in Madrid to the Galician village of San Pedro Fiz de Vilar. There, the paintings were exhibited in domestic settings—houses, stables, the local church or school—before they were given up to the passing of time… or to the fire. Through the artist’s reflections, the cooperation of the residents and the final ritual of the burning, the film portrays a process of letting go, memory and transformation, in which loss becomes the beginning of a new creative stage.
Like a diptych, this documentary is presented together with O carro e o home [The Cart and the Man], an audiovisual that is part of the legacy left by the ethnographer from Ourense Xaquín Lorenzo, Xocas, to the Museo do Pobo Galego, of which he was the founder and first chairman of the Board of Trustees. The original film—made in 1940, scripted by Xocas and directed by Antonio Román—recounts the life of the cart as a symbol of traditional Galician material culture. A work strongly influenced by Soviet cinema and the work of Robert J. Flaherty whose actors and actresses are the residents of the hamlet of Facós, in the Municipality of Lobeira (Ourense province), the birthplace of Xaquín Lorenzo.
In 1980, starting from a copy that appeared at the Museo Arqueolóxico Provincial de Ourense and is kept at the Museou do Pobo Galego, the ethnographer, together with film-maker Eloy Lozano, made a new cut with a less mock traditional soundtrack, with text and voiceover by Xocas himself. This second version, sponsored by the Museo do Pobo Galego, was recently digitalised in cooperation with AGADIC (Axencia Galega das Industrias Culturais) and Filmoteca de Galicia.
The presentation of the documentary will be carried out by Mateo Feijóo.

Credits:

La Quema [The Burning]
Authors: Daniel Fuertes Perea, Gabriel Jesús García Duque, Gregorio Alejandro Blanco Rivas
Production: Impro Films
Year: 2025
Length: 64 min

O carro e o home [The Cart and the Man]
1940/1980, Galicia, 11 min, original language
Production: P.A.C.E.
Director and photographer: Antonio Román
Script: Xaquín Lorenzo and Antonio Román
Editing: Antonio Román and Carlos Serrano de Osma
Narrator: Ignacio Mateo
Sound: Laffon-Selgas
Laboratory: Arroyo

O carro e o home [The Chart and the Man] (1980 cut)
Production: Praia Lenta Films and Museo do Pobo Galego
Restoration: Eloy Lozano
Script and editing: Xaquín Lorenzo and Eloy Lozano
Text and voiceover: Xaquín Lorenzo
Background music: Eloy Lozano

Bella Báguena. Jardín de piel [Garden of Skin]
2025-11-15 13:00 - 14:30
A vulnerable aria, a ritualistic conversation: she bleeds in front of her audience, accompanied by witchy textures, sublime atmospheres and ecstatic prayers. This Valencian artist’s confessional and autobiographical sound work narrates personal stories, sometimes cryptically and sometimes very openly.
Like a kind of contemporary folklore made up of disconnected and abstract stories, Bella uses her raw, operatic voice to address themes such as dissent, bodily transitioning, love and heartbreak, ecstasy, error and the unknown. She invites us—in the midst of Scorpio season—to a concert for lesbians and other sentient beings, presenting an echographic exploration of her inner world, her wanderings and paths, her outbursts, her obsessions and her emotional diary.

Bella Báguena (València, 1994) is a trans female artist who has worked in disciplines such as performance art and sculptural jewellery, currently focusing on her musical project. Combining pop imagery, internet culture and nature, her work explores the link between body, emotion and sonic experience, seeking to establish an honest connection between artist and spectator.
She has presented her work at institutions such as La Casa Encendida (Madrid), CCCB (Barcelona) and Palais de Tokyo (Paris), as well as with the Kuboraum brand (New York). She has collaborated on projects by Lina Lapelytė and was a SHAPE 2023 artist. In 2024, she completed a sound residency with A Comparative Dialogue Act for the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (Luxembourg Pavilion).

A session within the framework of the second edition of the “Following the Sun” cycle, curated by Gabriel Virgilio Luciani.

Presentation of the book "Tàpies i jo. Una exegesi recíproca", by Rita Segato
2025-11-19 18:00 - 19:00 | Museu Tàpies
The Museu Tàpies hosts the public presentation of the book Tàpies i jo. Una exegesi recíproca, which has arisen from the first edition of the International Essay Prize ‘Gestures of the Past, Thought of the Present’. The ceremony features the participation of Rita Segato, author of the publication; Imma Prieto, director of the Museu Tàpies; and Pablo Allepuz, curator of the collection.
The centennial of the birth of Antoni Tàpies (in 2023–2024) inaugurated a new stage in the manner his massive visual, literary and institutional legacy is approached. Following on the experience of that commemorative year, the museum has set up new structures for research and collaboration, such as with the Antoni Tàpies – UPF Chair in Contemporary Art and Thought—developed with the Universitat Pompeu Fabra—and the Institute of Critical Derives, encouraging interdisciplinary dialogue in inciting new ways of understanding the artist. This is the context of the International Essay Prize ‘Gestures of the Past, Thought of the Present’, which in each edition invites a theoretical to write an essay on Tàpies, reflecting their own expertise and knowledge.
The first invitee was Rita Segato, an internationally-recognised Argentine anthropologist and a key figure in feminist and decolonial thought. Free from the habitual conditions of artistic historiography, her perspective offers a new reading of Tàpies. Segato shifts the image of an artist centred on the self—author of his own autobiography, founder of the institution that bears his name—toward that self-questioning facet of Tàpies that is constantly shifting to a place outside of himself, open to alterity and reflection on the other. This reciprocal exegesis between Segato and Tàpies sketches out connections between anthropology and art, between matter and spirituality, between ethics and aesthetics. In her essay, the writer proposes seven ways to renew the study of Tàpies, opening Tàpies studies up to new frameworks of understanding on identity, belonging and the political meaning of creation. From a reading of gesture as a form of knowledge, to the connection between historical memory and present-day struggles, the book reveals Tàpies to be deeply contemporary, able to continually give rise to critical thinking out of the here and now.
Published in Catalan and Spanish, this work opens a new, stable editorial line of activity on the part of the Museu Tàpies, dedicated to the encouragement of research and the promotion of new perspectives on the artist’s work, in dialogue with current debates in contemporary thought.

[Artwork: Antoni Tàpies, Self Portrait, 1992 © Comissió Tàpies / VEGAP, 2025 ]

Mireia Calafell. FE-RI-DES (WOUNDS)
2025-11-27 19:00 - 19:30
What does it mean to think through wounds? What is it like to experience life through them? Can poets write about scars without using metaphors? Is it even worth trying?

The beginning is marked by a chair placed next to another, that is, a meeting between friends and the opportunity to pronounce wounds. Mireia Calafell uses friendship as a means of talking and reflecting on scars through the reading of her own poems, along with the words of others. She is joined by Fina Birulés, Miquel Missé, Pol Guasch and other voices who deserve to be heard when we talk about wounds. All this accompanied by another friend, composer Clara Peya, and her piano.
This activity is supported and endorsed by the Maria Canals International Piano Competition in Barcelona. As part of the second edition of the action cycle The chairs of Tàpies, by Judith Barnés, head of public programs at the Museu Tàpies.

Mireia Calafell is a poet. She is the author of Poètiques del cos (2006), Costures (2010), Tantes mudes (2014), Nosaltres, qui (2020) and Si una emergència (2024). She has received several awards, including the Lletra d’Or for Best Book in 2014, the Josep Maria Llopart Award for Best Poetry Collection Published in 2020 and the Carles Riba Award in 2023. Calafell is co-director of the La Sullivan cultural production company and was formerly co-director of the POESIA i + (2015–2016) and Barcelona Poesia (2018–2021) festivals.
Clara Peya is a pianist, composer and one of the most unique creators of the Catalan music scene. With a career that fuses jazz, pop, and electronica, she has released thirteen albums and has written numerous soundtracks for stage shows and cinema. Awarded the Premi Nacional de Cultura (2019), her work addresses issues such as feminism, dissidence, and vulnerability with great poetic and scenic power.

A collaboration with the Maria Canals International Piano Competition
Antoni Tàpies had an ongoing relationship with music throughout his career. His interest included contemporary music—which he was close to on an intellectual and creative level—and musical practice, understood as a universal language of communication. It was not fortuitous that Tàpies worked in collaboration with various initiatives where music and the arts were in dialogue, such as those organised by Club 49, a key space for the promotion of the artistic avant-garde in postwar Barcelona.
As part of the current collaboration between the Museu Tàpies and the Maria Canals Competition, for three days (November 28, 29 & 30, 2025) a piano from the event will be installed inside the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World, in dialogue with the broad presentation of invitations for cultural activities organised by Club 49. The proximity between the piano and these documents makes it possible to delve more deeply into the ambience of creative exchange Tàpies found himself in, as well as into the role played in it by contemporary music.
In parallel with the recovery of democracy, Tàpies sought to intensify his participation in cultural and social projects by creating posters, which he considered an accessible form of communication. This is the context of the poster the artist created for the 50th anniversary of the Maria Canals International Piano Competition, which arose out of his personal connection with the Barcelona music scene. Tàpies’ involvement was made possible due to the mediation of the Gaspar Farreras family and Galeria Gaspar, in particular through Elvira Farreras de Gaspar and her daughter Elvira Gaspar Farreras. The friendship between Tàpies and the musician Rossend Llates, the husband of pianist Maria Canals, is seen in the poster with the initials R. LL. on it, which likewise features those of the competition’s founder.
In the museum gallery we find Tàpies’ original artwork from which the poster was printed, making it possible to place the work in its context: dialogue between the visual arts and music, complicity between creators and cultural institutions, and the role of Tàpies as an artist closely aligned with the social and cultural fabric of the Catalonia of his time.

[Photography by Àlex Espuny]

International Symposium "Primitive Images, Modern Dreams: Tàpies and Post-War Visual Culture"
2025-12-03 - 2025-12-04
As part of the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World, the Museu Tàpies is organising an international symposium to explore the study of the image on the basis of its collection. This initiative is part of the museum’s ongoing line of research and aims to rethink the visual narratives that shape our collective imagination, paying special attention to the symbolic, aesthetic world view surrounding Antoni Tàpies’ work.
The symposium sets out from the body of work on exhibition, made up of works by Tàpies from the forties and fifties, prior to his material period; pieces belonging to the artist’s private collection from non-Western cultures or by other artists in his context, and archive material—both belonging to the museum and acquired by it specifically to prepare this exhibition—related to the popular imagination of the day.
On the basis of these materials, the symposium concentrates on three subject areas that can be followed throughout the exhibition: primitivism, psychoanalysis and popular culture. These areas allow us to place Tàpies’ artistic output in the context of a post-war Barcelona deeply marked by social, political and cultural changes, and to connect it with international avant-garde movements. At the same time, this encounter sets out to explore other aspects, such as the way Tàpies approached vernacular traditions and ancestral practices, the impact of psychoanalytic thought on his work as a tool for addressing psychological concerns typical of an era, and the dialogue between academic art and popular knowledge as forms of resistance and radical expression.
The symposium stands out for its interdisciplinary approach, incorporating philosophy and psychoanalysis to address images not only as aesthetic forms but also as instruments of thought and symbolic construction. Its ultimate goal is to offer an updated, critical reading of Tàpies’ work, opening up spaces for discussion of the image, the historical narrative and cultural memory.

Programme of the symposium

Wednesday, 3 December 2025
· 6 pm. Welcome and presentation by the Museu Tàpies
· 6.10 pm. Talk: ‘The Material Imagination’, by Emmanuel Alloa
· 6.50 pm. Talk: ‘A Visionary Context: Spiritualism, Clairvoyance and the Unconscious’, by Andrea Graus Ferrer
· 7.30 pm. Break
· 7.40 pm. Talk: ‘The Origin and Context of primitivism in Antoni Tàpies’, by Estela Ocampo
· 8.20 pm. Round table and debate moderated by the Museu Tàpies
· 9 pm. Closing

Thursday, 4 December 2025
· 6 pm. Welcome and presentation by the Museu Tàpies
· 6.10 pm. Talk: ‘Imagination, imagined, imaginary’, by Chiara Boticci (online)
· 6.50 pm. Talk: ‘Club 49, a Window on the World’, by Muriel Gómez
· 7.30 pm Break
· 7.40 pm Talk: ‘Swing and Modernity: Jazz in postwar Barcelona’ by Jordi Pujol Baulenas
· 8.20 pm. Round table and debate moderated by the Museu Tàpies
· 9 pm. Close with ‘Echoes of Club 49’, by the Carlos Falanga Trio

Speakers

Emmanuel Alloa. Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy at the University of Freiburg (Switzerland). A researcher at NCCR eikones, he has lectured at Paris 8 University and been a guest lecturer at the universities of Weimar (Germany), Morelia (Mexico), Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Shanghai (China) and Berkeley, Columbia and Yale (United States).
Alloa has published a dozen books on contemporary philosophy, phenomenology and the relations between aesthetics and politics. His work has been translated into English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese. Highlights among his publications in Spanish include: La resistencia de lo sensible (2009), ¿Cómo (no) leer las imágenes? (2019), La imagen diáfana (2021), Pensar la imagen I & II (2020 and 2022) and Repartos de la perspectiva (2024). His research work has won several awards, including the Latsis Award in 2016 and the Aby Warburg Award in 2019.

Chiara Bottici. An Italian philosopher and writer, she lives and works in New York. She holds a chair in Philosophy in the Philosophy department of the New School for Social Research, where she lectures, among other things, on the thought of Hannah Arendt and Ágnes Heller. As well as lecturing in political philosophy and aesthetics, at the same institution she has founded and run the Gender and Sexualities Studies Institute.
She has written, among other things, Filosofía del mito político (Bollati Boringhieri, 2012), The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations (2010, with Benoît Challand), Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory and Identity (2013, with Benoît Challand), Manifest anarcafeminista (Laterza, 2022), Cap submissió: El feminisme com a crítica de l’ordre social (2023), Mitologia feminista (Castelvecchi, 2022) and La política de la imaginació (Castelvecchi, 2023). Her work has been translated into a dozen foreign languages.

Carlos Falanga. Born in Buenos Aires (Argentina), at a very early age he started learning drums with Roberto Cesari Jr. At the age of 22 he decided to move to Barcelona, where he continued his study of harmony and the piano at the Taller de Músics, and of the drums with the great Aldo Caviglia. He subsequently graduated from the Barcelona Conservatory (ESMUC), where he studied with Jo Krause and David Xirgu.
Since 2002 he has played an active part in the Catalan music scene, performing in clubs and festivals all over Europe, Asia and the Americas, with a range of Spanish musicians and artists including Jorge Rossy, Marco Mezquida, Amparo Sanchez, Carme Canela, Horacio Fumero, Bill McHenry, Fredrik Carlquist, Guillermo Klein and the Orquestra Simfònica del Liceu, among others. He has released two albums under his own name: Gran Coral (Underpool) and Quasar (Fresh Sound New Talent), and with his experimental project IHHH he has made several recordings and performed at many festivals, including Sónar Festival and Keroxen.

Muriel Gómez. She has a doctorate in the History of Art from the University of Zaragoza. She is currently an associate lecturer and vice-dean for Alliances, Community and Culture in Art and Humanities Studies at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). A member of the SEC (Society, State and Culture) history research group, her research focuses on the analysis of processes of rupture and continuity in Catalan artistic modernity between the pre-war and post-war periods. Her main areas of study include the links between ADLAN and Club 49, and the figures of Joan Miró and the sculptor Eudald Serra.

Andrea Graus Ferrer. Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Institució Milà i Fontanals d’Investigació en Humanitats at the CSIC. With a doctorate in the History of Science from the UAB, she worked at the Centre Alexandre Koyré at the CNRS in Paris and at the University of Anvers (Belgium) for six years. The author of Ciència i espiritisme a Espanya (1880-1930) (Comares, 2019), she has published work on the history of psychic research with mediums, hypnosis and mystical phenomena in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her current line of research focuses on the history of gifted children and child talent in contemporary Europe, the subject of her next book. She curated the exhibition Gifted Children: Fame, Science and Politics (Biblioteca de Catalunya, 2024).

Estela Ocampo. She was a tenured lecturer at the University of Barcelona from 1987 and at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona from 1987 until her retirement in September 2021. Academic secretary at the Pompeu Fabra University’s Institut de Cultura (2000–2008). Director of the Pompeu Fabra University’s Institut Universitari de Cultura (2008–2014), She is currently director and lead researcher at CIAP, the Research Centre for Primitive Art and Primitivism at the Pompeu Fabra University. She has carried out research projects funded by the Spanish ministry of education and science into primitive art between 1997 and 2003, and into primitivism and modern art between 2007 and 2016.
She has published numerous articles in Spanish and international journals. Her most recent books are: El Fetitxe en el Museu, (Madrid, 2011), Primitivisme a Europa i Amèrica, (Barcelona, 2017) and Traços. Pintura aborigen australiana: tradició i contemporaneïtat (Barcelona, 2022), among others. She has given numerous lectures and seminars in Spain and abroad. She has curated several exhibitions, the last being Strokes. Australian Aboriginal Painting: Tradition and Contemporaneity (Museu Etnològic i de les Cultures del Món, December 2021 – June 2022).

Jordi Pujol Baulenas. Born in Barcelona in 1953, in 1983 he founded the music label Fresh Sound Records, devoted to jazz, after having worked as a textile designer in Lyon and Barcelona. In the course of his career, he has recovered historic recordings like the concert by Louis Armstrong in Windsor (1955), and, with the label Fresh Sound New Talent, recorded the debut albums by artists like Brad Mehldau, Robert Glasper, Ambrose Akinmusire and Kurt Rosenwinkel, as well as numerous local musicians. The winner of awards from the Académie du Jazz and the Académie Charles Cros, he has featured in articles and interviews in media including Down Beat, Jazz Magazine, The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. He is the author of the book Jazz a Barcelona 1920-1965, winner of the Ciutat de Barcelona Award in 2006.

[Imagen: Antoni Tàpies, Gossos (Dogs), 1948. Col·lecció particular, Barcelona © Comissió Tàpies / VEGAP, 2025]

Artistic mediations at the André du Colombier: A Lyrical Point of View exhibition, with Estel Boada
2025-12-05 17:30 - 18:30
Mediation experience at the André du Colombier: A Lyrical Point of View exhibition, led by artist Estel Boada, aimed at the audiences visiting the museum on Friday afternoons.
What connection do you think there is between a ceramic frog, a collection of rubbers, different-coloured party plates and shopping bags? These are some of the mundane objects which du Colombier gave a poetic setting and space. What would you choose from your bag or your pockets if you had to give an improvised gift? Don’t worry: if you haven’t got anything on you, you can always give a play on words! In this immersion in du Colombier’s work we’ll be revealing new messages hidden behind the assemblages selected for the exhibition at the Museu Tàpies, creating new plays on words and listening to music from the edges in a homage to du Colombier’s outside universe.

Estel Boada (Barcelona, ​​1991), singer and multidisciplinary artist, defines herself as a contextual juggler. With a background in Fine Arts, she explores space, community, and voice through performance. Her work, marked by humor and absurdity with touches of fantasy, burlesquely reflects on her life as a “frustrated diva.” Interested in experimental education, contextual art, sound, music, and drawing, she uses action and humor as tools of critique. She has participated in numerous interdisciplinary art interventions and curated self-organized contemporary art series. She is also a composer and vocalist for various musical projects.

Mami Sugar. Search no. 3: Rewriting
2025-12-13 13:00 - 14:30
A sock: an everyday object, minimal, almost insignificant. When I look at it, I make an immediate association:
sock → foot → shoe
And this journey leads me to think about hundreds, thousands of people who walk:

who cross deserts, coasts, cities and frontiers;
who reach Europe or try to get to Catalonia;
who disappear from our view as soon as they get to the city;
who cannot go into museums, but sustain everyday life.

I think of those who live on the edges, about non-normative bodies that do not fit into the official narrative. I think of those, still without papers, who build and sustain the Catalan economy:

the people in the fields in Lleida province,
those who work in recycling with the same materials that Tàpies used to create his work.

Those invisible presences who are here; their ancestors felt the whip that helped to raise up this country with raw materials like cocoa, coffee, sugar and timber.
And if I think of Tàpies, I inevitably think of Catalonia. And if I think of Catalonia, is see the senyera, its flag. How would a Catalan flag be constructed today?
What is its gold? Whose is the blood behind the four red bars?
But I am Catalan. This flag is also mine. We need to appropriate the symbols, transform them, play with them, create new narratives.
This is another foundational story for the 21st-century Catalan flag, made from the socks of Afro-descendent people who walk over fictitious blood.
This is why I propose a different senyera: a flag created from the sidelines, from the bodies that are not expected in the street but are exhibited in the museum as a symbol of diversity and integration.
In this other flag, the yellow is the gold of Abya Yala: the wealth extracted from Africa and Latin America, today turned into coltan, cocoa, oil and extractive companies that sustain European well-being. The red is the blood of the transatlantic trade: a trail that lives on in the deaths in the Mediterranean, on the frontiers where black bodies continue to bleed.
Because the black presence in Catalonia does not begin with recent migration: it is ancient, it is in the land and in time.
In almost all regions of Africa there exists a figure that connects the worlds of the living and the dead. A presence that dresses in clothing made of dried leaves, of fibres, of cloths, of materials that breathe memory. It is a mask that entertains children, that dances, that provokes, but that also guides, supports and helps to transcend. A figure that does not just appear: it intercedes. That does not just dance: it opens gateways. That does not just play: it protects.
I want to take this ancestral figure and create one of our own; a being wearing socks, with the socks of people who migrate to Catalonia, and also the socks used to create this new flag.
Socks get lost in the wash, yes; but they are also the best place to keep secrets, to protect small treasures, to keep us from the cold in the world. This is why I ask the migrant community for these odd socks in order to create a suit to dialogue face to face with Tàpies’ giant sock; a suit to stir a dance of the marginalised, a movement to bring together times and places, to connect me to the thousands of people who walk, who make the crossing over to Europe, to Spain, to Catalonia. Because when there are no shoes, when all has been lost or left behind, we will carry on walking in socks.
My body—black, female, nearly fifty years old, fat, queer, excessive—is not the expected body. But it is this body that today constructs this new senyera. That claims its place in the narrative. That says: Catalonia is also written by us. That declares: we are here, we have always been here and we are a fundamental part of what this territory is and what it may become.

Silvia Albert Sopale

Silvia Albert Sopale is an actress by vocation, a director by obligation, a dramatist by social responsibility and an activist out of love for blackness. Born in San Sebastián, she is the daughter of a Boobe mother from Equatorial Guinea and an Igbo father from Nigeria. She currently lives in Barcelona.
She is founder of Periferia Cimarronas, the first Black theatre company in Spain; she taught the 2025 spring chair at the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at the University of New York; she is a member of the Academia de las Artes Escénicas de España; founder of Hibiscus, the association of Afro-Spaniards and Afro-descendants; and director of the Festival Black Barcelona. She is also co-founder of Tinta Negra, a collective promoting racial diversity in the performing arts, and member of t.i.c.t.a.c. (Taller de Intervenciones Críticas Transfeministas Antirracistas Combativas).
She is joint creator of No es país para negras (2014), Blackface y otras vergüenzas (2019), Parad de pararme (2021), La Moreneta (2021), Cuentos desde la Periferia (2023), Mahmud y no solo Mahmud (2023) and Lotö, un ritual de emancipación corporal (2024).
Her work is studied in universities in Spain and the United States, and she has staged productions in New York, Chicago, Colombia and several European countries.

The programming and curating of the second edition of the Following the Sun cycle has been carried out by Gabriel Virgilio Luciani.

Unspeakable Magic
2025-12-16 18:00 - 19:00
The third edition of the series A Hatch in the Void, conceived by the writer Marc Caellas for the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World, features the participation of Esteban Feune de Colombi and Félix Denuit.
On this occasion, Caellas will install a number of oracles to serve viewers, who will be invited to participate in brief personalised sessions. Instead of working like a predictive artifice, each oracle works as a poetic, sensitive device, a tool to reveal what has remained hidden—in our perception, in aesthetic experience or in the act of looking. The activity proposes an opening up exercise, allowing intuition, ancestral wisdom and latent energies to find a place to express themselves.
This play of interpretations, combining performativity, presence and imagination, comes into direct dialogue with the ideas of Tàpies. Like the magician, the artist was well aware that almost everything is a trick, yet he also knew that authentic magic is not based on trickery but on what gets activated between the creator and the observer. For Tàpies, over and above the final result what mattered was the process, along with shared mystery and the affective relationship forged through objects and gestures.
“Unspeakable Magic” calls on us to explore this terrain between the visible and invisible, between art and ritual, experiencing the work and thought of Tàpies up close, in an intimate, unforeseen manner.

[Image: detail of one of the showcases of the exhibition Antoni Tàpies. The imagination of the World.]

Thinking ‘After’: I can’t breathe
2025-12-20 11:00 - 13:00
As part of the ‘Euphoric Criticism’ series, organised by the Grup Obert d’Art Polític (GOAP) in collaboration with Museu Tàpies, we have asked Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi to talk about the notion of ‘after’, which seems to have permeated our lives in recent years: pandemics, polarisation, wars and genocides, as well as runaway technology, have reinforced the feeling that the world and its institutions have entered a new era.
Like poetry after Auschwitz according to Adorno, like history after the end of history according to Fukuyama, we find ourselves in a disaffected point in time in which we need to learn to think from other reference points: we live in a post-humanism after the rupture between nature and culture, and with a technology that is automating us for the benefit of a techno-fascist elite. Berardi’s latest book, Thinking Gaza, confirms this same disaffected and disoriented situation. We do not know where these space and time of the ‘after’ lie, nor through what body or what politics a humanised way out can materialise. ‘I can’t breathe’, we say, as victims of violent repression: let us breathe and share political intuitions.
Presentation by Xavier Bassas and Laura Llevadot, members of GOAP.
The act will conclude with a poetical reading by Mireia Calafell.

Franco Berardi, known as Bifo since youth, has been a leading figure in left-wing thought in recent decades. In May 1968, he took part in the student revolt at the University of Bologna. He also joined the extra-parliamentary group Potere Operaio, alongside figures such as Toni Negri. During those years of unrest, he founded the magazine A/traverse and participated in the pirate radio station Alice. In his works, Berardi abandons orthodox Marxism and draws on the teachings and concepts of psychoanalysis to articulate his critique of post-industrial capitalist society. His latest books are permeated by the idea of the future, of what comes after, of our emotional (in)ability to move beyond an automated and depressing era.
Some of his numerous books include Thinking Gaza: An Essay on Ferocity (English translation forthcoming: Semiotext(e), 2026) and Breathing: Chaos and Poetry (Semiotext(e), 2019).

Transformation. Activities for families
2025-12-28 11:00 - 12:00
Dynamic guided tour for families of the exhibitions Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World and André du Colombier. A Lyrical Point of View.
How does an egg transform into a butterfly? And how does this happen in art? Can things also transform? Antoni Tàpies and André du Colombier shared a deep interest in the objects and the magic of transformation. Would you like to know how they expressed it?
During this activity, we will discover that the work of both artists is full of references to the objects, and we will listen to what they are telling us. But we will have to keep our eyes wide open to let ourselves be carried away by their magic!

[Imatge: Antoni Tàpies. Dona-arbre (1944). Private Collection, Barcelona © Comissió Tàpies / VEGAP, 2025]

Where Is Political Art? Debate and presentation of the book Estética posfundacional
2026-01-10 11:00 - 13:00 | Museu Tàpies
The question of the political power of art runs through the 20th and 21st centuries. But where is political art today? What we are radically asking is “where” it is, in all respects. What practices is it present in? What theories is it defined in? In what situations is it useful to us?
The multi-author publication Estética posfundacional [Post-Foundational Aesthetics] (Dykinson, 2005) brings together a body of philosophical essays that seek to respond to these and other questions related to the notion of post-foundational aesthetics. In the wake of the ideas of Oliver Marchart, who will be present at the event, the contributing authors address issues such as anarchy, dissent, the curatorial function and artistic activism, in an effort to comprehend art’s revolutionary power. As we understand that the political foundations of our societies are historical and material, aesthetic reflection becomes essential in questioning the underlying violence of political systems, while imagining alternatives.
The book presentation will feature the presence of various of the participating authors.

Oliver Marchart is an Austrian political philosopher and sociologist who is internationally recognised for his research in social theory, post-Marxism, post-structuralism and social movements. His books have given rise to far-reaching debate in many fields, as in the case of Post-Foundational Political Thought (Edinburgh University Press, 2007) and Conflictual Aesthetics (Sternberg Press, 2019), translated into Spanish by FCE and Ned Ediciones, respectively.

Laura Llevadot is a Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Barcelona, and lead researcher in the research group Post-Foundational Contemporary Thought.

Juan Evaristo Valls Boix is a writer and Professor of the Philosophy of Culture at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He has a PhD in Contemporary Philosophy and Literary Theory, and is member of the research groups Post-Foundational Contemporary Thought and Estética Contemporánea. His research engages laziness and the rejection of work in late capitalism, with special attention to the politics of affects and contemporary French philosophy. His publications include the essays Giorgio Agamben. Política sin obra (Gedisa, 2020), Metafísica de la pereza (Ned Ediciones, 2022), Suely Rolnik. Descolonizar el inconsciente (Herder, 2024) and El derecho a las cosas bellas (Ariel, 2025).

Ester Jordana Lluch is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Zaragoza, with undergraduate degrees in Psychology (2001) and Philosophy (2008), and a PhD in Philosophy with a thesis on Michel Foucault (Être autrement. El ser como transformación en Michel Foucault, 2017). Her research is focused on the relations between politics, aesthetics and contemporary critical thought.

Xavier Bassas has a PhD in French Language and Philosophy from Paris-Sorbonne University and from the University of Barcelona, where he is a professor in French Studies. He is a translator and editor of various works in French theory (Marion, Derrida, Rancière, Malabou and others), and has recently written a monograph on Rancière (Ensayar la igualdad, Gedisa) as well as a dialogue with him on the politics of language (El litigio de las palabras, Ned Ediciones; in French, Les Mots et les Torts, La fabrique éditions). He is editor-in-chief of the book collection Pensamiento Atiempo for Casus Belli Ediciones.

Adrià Porta is a pre-doctoral researcher in the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Barcelona. He is currently writing a thesis that compares the concept of the void in the work of four thinkers in post-foundational political philosophy: Lefort, Laclau, Badiou and Rancière.

Virginia Trueba is Full Professor in the Faculty of Philology and Communication of the University of Barcelona (UB), where she teaches in the Hispanic Philology and Literary Studies degree programmes, and in the master in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature. In recent years she has focused her research on the relationship between poetry and the arts in contemporary thought. She is co-editor of the journal Aurora, dedicated to the ideas of María Zambrano, and is member of the GLiCiArt (UB) research group on literature, cinema and other artistic languages.

Poetics of Irruption. Visits in Dialogue
2026-01-14 18:00 - 19:00
The Museu Tàpies presents a series of visits in dialogue to explore the unique world of André du Colombier, one of the most enigmatic and fascinating artists of his generation. The exhibition André du Colombier: A Lyrical Point of View, curated by Adam Szymczyk, unfolds an artistic practice where language is put into tension to the point of becoming visual material, and words and signs take on their own, almost physical properties.
Du Colombier (Barcelona, 1952 – Paris, 2003) explored the frontiers of language with radical freedom. His artwork plays with repetition, the contrast between capital and small letters, the identity of commas and accents, and the possibility for words to refer solely to themselves. The result is a body of work that questions linguistic structures and puts the very meaning of communication into crisis, thus opening up space for the absurd, silence, music and poetry.
With this series, the Museu Tàpies aims to relate the world of du Colombier to the perspectives of contemporary creators and thinkers. Each session brings together two invitees—from the visual arts, literature and poetry—to share their subjective reading of du Colombier’s work and engage in dialogue with the public. These are not conventional guided visits, but rather encounters where words and the gaze are activated in a shared and lively manner, turning the exhibition into a collective and possibly transformative experience.

The visits in dialogue will be guided by:
· Alicia Kopf i Raquel Santanera (4/11/25)
· Míriam Cano i Oriol Vilanova (11/12/25)
· Ignasi Aballí i Eduard Escoffet (14/01/26)

Imagined World: Audio Description as a View
2026-01-17 17:00 - 18:00
Imagined World is an inclusive experience to bring Antoni Tàpies’ work to people with visual disability through live, expressive audio description. The activity invites you to connect with art immersively, entering into a profound dialogue with the works in the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World.
The audio describer guides visitors with visual disability, first by situating them in the art venue and then with an introduction to the artist and the exhibition. After this, they explore some of the highlights, finishing with a brief chat between the audio describer and the visitors. An evocative, detailed and empathetic description enriches the experience of the art, exploring new ways to perceive and interpret it.
The activity is led by Aleix Castany Jaen, a person with impaired vision, a graduate in History of Art and Film Studies, art audio describer and actor.
Activity devised by Aleix Castany Jaen and Marina Saura Olivella.
Activity aimed at people with visual disability and those accompanying them.

Drawing Visit: "Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World" with Oriol Vilapuig
2026-01-21 18:00 - 20:00 | Museu Tàpies
With what specificities does drawing operate in the formation of an image? What happens if we shift the focus of attention from the drawing to the one who draws, from the object to the action that produces it? Can we also interpret an image with our body?
We propose a visit in which drawing and, by extension, our body will lead us as a form of knowledge and connection. We will explore the work of Antoni Tàpies through the language of drawing, as an original and specific gesture. An action that produces an image through a filter, the body, which is extremely complex, fragile and sensitive. We will think of drawing as based on the bodily movements that produce friction between the support and the materials, in specific temporal and spatial conditions that generate an image as a result. This image, however specific and symbolic it may be, also describes a body that generates friction. Thus, drawing could be understood as a map, a cartography of gestures and behaviours, a sensory record shared between two bodies: that of an author who creates and activates it and that of a receiver who collects it with their own body, seeing as they also recognise themselves in the gestures that produced it.
We invite you to take part in a drawing activity where we will think through activating the frictions that are inherent in the gestation of an image through the work of Antoni Tàpies, based on material approaches such as gesture, speed, friction and matter, yet understanding them as a state linked to its emotional, political and spiritual conditions. A hands-on activity that invites us to explore the work of Antoni Tàpies through the language of drawing and its performative potential.

Oriol Vilapuig Morera (Sabadell, 1964)
Visual artist who mainly works with the language of drawing, his practice involves an essayistic approach. The question of images, their possibilities and rules, as well as their ways of appearing, are a constant in his work. His work also expands into the field of teaching through the performative possibilities of drawing and its modes of use. He teaches workshops as a lecturer in the Fine Arts degree at BAU – Centre Universitari d’Arts i Disseny de Barcelona and at Illa – Escola d’Art i Disseny de Sabadell. He has exhibited in a number of solo and group exhibitions. His work is part of several collections and has received critical acclaim.

Dry Stone Library
2026-01-22 18:00 - 20:30 | Museu Tàpies
The library of the poet and art critic Vicenç Altaió is a boundless accumulation of experiences, where the book is the place for the settlement of words. Communication with them is never-ending; if you listen closely, you can hear the authors’ voices, holding out for the passage of history, patiently waiting to be reread by younger generations. A few of them go beyond the limits of the “closed-book syndrome”, reviving performatively in space and time.
The Museu Tàpies presents the most recent film by Joan Vall Karsunke, known for his work in documentary and experimental cinema, with a focus on cultural memory, philosophical reflection and the poetics of imagery. In this work, the filmmaker explores the library of the poet and essayist Vicenç Altaió, capturing the essence of the person through profound conversations and a carefully-crafted aesthetic. The film defines itself as a road-book movie, featuring the intervention of 23 figures from the world of art, music and literature.
After the screening, a conversation will take place between the director, Joan Vall Karsunke; the film’s editor, Ginebra Vall; and the writer Vicenç Altaió.

Credits:
Biblioteca de pedra seca [Dry Stone Library]
Joan Vall Karsunke, 2025, Catalonia, Catalan version, 98 min, DCP.
With the participation of Perejaume, Josep M. Sala-Valldaura, Valentina Valentini, Alfredo Pirri, Mario Gas, Biel Mesquida, Albert Serra, Stella Rahola, Frederic Amat, Pere Noguera, Blanca Llum Vidal, Jordi Cuixart, Hannah Collins, Alfredo Jaar, Miquel Barceló, Fina Miralles and Laia Estruch.
Music: Nicolas Jaar, Carles Santos, Llorenç Balsach, Marina Herlop and Pascal Comelade.

Presentation of the catalogue "Marta Palau: My Paths are Earthly"
2026-01-28 18:00 - 19:30 | Museu Tàpies
The Museu Tàpies is pleased to present the catalogue for the exhibition Marta Palau: My Paths are Earthly. This publication is essential for exploring the work of a unique artistic voice, brought to the fore by the museum with her first major European retrospective. The exhibition of the work of Marta Palau (Albesa, Lleida, 1934 – Mexico City, 2022) was open to the public from 27 February to 17 August, 2025.
This publication, prepared in collaboration with the MUAC (Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM), features texts by Imma Prieto, Amanda de la Garza, María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco, Maria Josep Balsach, Rita Eder, Natalia de la Rosa and Cuauhtémoc Medina, articulating the exhibition’s main conceptual themes: her relationship with the earth, exile, the body, memory and the ability to create life through art. The catalogue also presents drawings, paintings and large-scale textile installations, as well as previously-unseen material from Marta Palau’s personal archive. It thus presents a living dialogue between the artist’s biography and the historical context she lived in, giving rise to universal questions, tensions and conflicts that persist into our time. The book, published in Catalan, Spanish and English, features 248 pages, and contains 140 images illustrating Palau’s vast creative universe.
The catalogue will be presented by Imma Prieto, director of the Museu Tàpies and curator of the project Marta Palau: My Paths are Earthly; Nieves Berenguer, the book’s designer; and Bettina Moll, the publication’s editor. With the presence of Marta Gassol, the artist’s daughter.
This event is an invitation to learn more about the work of Marta Palau, and to discover how these multiple paths might lead us to consider each of our own paths, querying us about artistic legacies, historical memory and hegemonic narratives.

Technical information:
Marta Palau. Els meus camins són terrestres
Marta Palau. Mis caminos son terrestres
Marta Palau: My Paths are Earthly
Authors: Imma Prieto, Amanda de la Garza, María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco, Maria Josep Balsach, Rita Eder, Natalia de la Rosa and Cuauhtémoc Medina

Publishers: Museu Tàpies and MUAC
Languages: Catalan, Spanish and English (independent editions)
ISBN: 978-84-128816-6-0 (Catalan), 978-84-128816-0-8 (Spanish), 978-84-128816-1-5 (English)
Year: 2025
248 pages
18 x 26 cm
140 images
Hardcover
Price: 46.80 euros

fe sense obres morta és, by Albert Serra
2026-01-29
The Museu Tàpies has organised a series of screenings for the public presentation of fe sense obres morta és [faith without works is dead], the new film production by Albert Serra, which renders homage to the person and work of Antoni Tàpies. The initiative arose from the museum’s intent to expand understanding of the Tàpies’ legacy through “indisciplined” contemporary gazes, able to forge new narratives from his work. The proposal pertains to a line of programming that emphasises experimentation and dialogue between diverse artistic expressions.
In this context, Serra—an internationally recognised filmmaker, producer and screenwriter whose career is distinguished by formal freedom and conceptual radicality—has accepted the challenge of creating a personal, unrestrained and nontransferable approximation to the universe of Tàpies. The result is a film that does not seek to explain nor interpret, but rather to suggest, invoke and emotionally move us. It is a piece that is open and sensorial, opting for poetic evocation over direct representation.
In fe sense obres morta és, Serra delves into the most intimate and spiritual terrains of the production of Tàpies, exploring the material limits, symbolic charge and philosophical density of a unique gaze that is incorruptible and always provocative. The film sidesteps conventional narrative in constructing an immersive experience that dialogues with the artist’s thought and aesthetics, accentuating their present-day relevance, complexity and transformative verve. It is an audiovisual project that is much more than a portrait or exercise in interpretation: it is an autonomous artistic proposal that, with the world of Tàpies as its starting point, reveals hidden and unexpected aspects of it. It is also an invitation to approach Tàpies from new perspectives, through the language of film as a realm of reflection and interpretation.
With this screening series, the Museu Tàpies solidifies its commitment to contemporary creation and to the critical revision of Antoni Tàpies’ work, encouraging encounters between a diverse set of generations, disciplines and artistic sensibilities.

Fact sheet:
fe sense obres morta és
Albert Serra, Catalonia, 2025. DCP, Catalan, 52 min.

Albert Serra has a degree in Spanish Philology and Comparative Literature from the University of Barcelona. As a film director, he is considered one of the leading contemporary filmmakers internationally. His international debut was with Honor de cavalleria, which premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival; it was considered one of the best films of the year by the prestigious French journal Cahiers du Cinéma. In 2009 he returned to Cannes with El cant dels ocells, which was chosen for and won awards at various international festivals. He has also directed projects for museums: Els noms de Crist, presented at the MACBA exhibition Are You Ready for TV? (2010); and El Senyor ha fet en mi meravelles, for the exhibition The Complete Letters at the CCCB. In 2013 he wrote and directed the film Història de la meva mort, winner of the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival, and considered one of the best films of the year by The New Yorker. These recognitions situated him on the stage of world cinema. In 2016 he premiered La mort de Lluís XIV, which won the Prix Jean Vigo and received seven nominations for the Gaudí Awards. In 2019 he returned to Cannes with Liberté, a film about the libertines expelled from the puritan court of Louis XVI, wining the Special Jury Prize. In 2022 he directed Pacifiction, a hypnotic thriller shot in French Polynesia. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, competing for the Palme d’Or, and was chosen best film of 2022 by Cahiers du Cinéma; it also won the Louis Delluc Prize and received nine nominations for the César Awards.

The Rebellious Image: Germaine Dulac and the Feminine Imagination in Surrealism
2026-02-03 18:00 - 20:30 | Museu Tàpies
On the occasion of the exhibition dedicated to filmmaker Germaine Dulac, a pioneer in avant-garde film and a key figure in cinematographic surrealism, the Museu Tàpies has organised a debate centred on exploring the symbolic, aesthetic and political realm of the feminine imagination in surrealism.
From a critically rigorous and poetically attuned perspective, the event constitutes a space for reflection on the forms in which female artists and thinkers have intervened in, expanded or subverted the codes of surrealism, often conceived from a masculine perspective. Debate participants will consider questions such as the construction of the body and desire, feminine authorship within the avant-garde and the relationship between cinema, dreams and symbolic liberation.
“The Rebellious Image: Germaine Dulac and the Feminine Imagination in Surrealism” is an invitation to rethink avant-garde narratives on the basis of gesture, symbolism and rupture, while likewise paying attention to how an avant-garde movement that was able to transform the invisible into image and desire in language, might resonate in our day.

PROGRAMME

6 pm. Presentation of the session, by the Museu Tàpies
6.10 pm. Tami Williams, “Germaine Dulac and Long Impressionist Cinema”
6.40 pm. Julia Ramírez Blanco, “Poetics of the Anti-Fascist Body”
7.10 pm. Elena Castro Córdoba, “Dance, Images, Dance!”
7.40 pm. Debate with Tami Williams, Julia Ramírez Blanco and Elena Castro Córdoba, moderated by Bruna Lo Biundo
20.15 h. Closing

PARTICIPANTS

Tami Williams is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and has been president for two mandates of Domitor – International Society for the Study of Early Cinema (2015–2023). She is the author and editor of various books on early cinema and modern cinema, including Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations (2014), Global Cinema Networks (2018), Germaine Dulac: What Is Cinema? (2019, awarded the CNC Film Book Prize in 2020), Provenance and Early Cinema (2021) and Crafts, Trades, and Techniques of Early Cinema (2024). A specialist in intermediality and intercultural exchange, she has organised international retrospectives in leading institutions, including La Cinémathèque française, Musée d’Orsay, Il Cinema Ritrovato, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, the Library of Congress and the Lincoln Center for the Arts. She is a member of the committee of Women and Film History International.

Julia Ramírez Blanco is a Ramón y Cajal Researcher at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her research connects art history, utopian studies and activist movements. She has published various monographs, including Artistic Utopias of Revolt (Palgrave, 2018), 15M. El tiempo de las plazas (Alianza, 2021), Amigos, disfraces y comunas. Las hermandades de artistas del siglo xix (Cátedra, 2022) and La ciudad del Sol. Le mouvement 15M entre formes et performances (Éditions Lorelei, 2023). She is also a book and journal issue editor, as with Los ismos del siglo xxi (Alianza, 2025), with A. M. Guasch. She has done research residencies in New York, Paris, Nantes, Amiens and Princeton. With Lise Lérichomme and Sally Bonn, she has co-directed the research project and exhibition Grande Révolution Domèstique-Guise, on feminist utopias at the Familistère de Guise, France. She was on the editorial board of The Society for Utopian Studies and is a member of the international research group Center for Artistic Activism (C4AA). Currently she is researching environmental utopias in the face of climate crisis.

Elena Castro Córdoba has a PhD in Feminist and Gender Studies from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, a Master in Gender, Media & Culture from Goldsmiths University, London, and a BA in Philosophy from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She has been an FPU pre-doctoral researcher at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where she developed a thesis on queer and affective temporalities applied to the archive, and is co-founder of the artistic collective Ontologías Feministas, specialised in virtuality and practices with a feminist perspective. She is currently a lecturer at EINA and a teaching collaborator at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She researches and writes on contemporary feminism, the archive, temporal politics and their interrelationship with contemporary aesthetics.

Bruna Lo Biundo is a researcher specialised in the representation of women in the period between the wars, with particular interest in surrealism and the feminist film pioneer Germaine Dulac. With a PhD in French Literature from the University of Palermo, she has worked as a curator and head researcher in institutions such as the Mémorial de la Shoah and La Contemporaine (Nanterre University), as well as projects on female immigrants and refugees in France in the 20th century. She is co-founder of the association Past/Not Past, and is currently preparing a documentary exhibition on Germaine Dulac. Since 2024, she has coordinated the Master in Audiovisual Heritage at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, where she also teaches on curating and participative practices.
Film still from La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman), 1928.

Playlist with the video conferences:

Objects and Other Things: Guided Carnival Visit
2026-02-07 11:00 - 14:00
A common feature of the artistic practices of Joan Brossa and André du Colombier is the key role played by poetry and objects. Du Colombier was born in 1952 in Barcelona, though rather by chance, as his father taught philosophy in French schools abroad. Even so, his family did not stay for very long, and there is no evidence he would have met Brossa, who was born in the same city in 1919. Their works share an interest in language, a sense of humour and a playful spirt, along with a common concern for everyday objects, an anti-establishment attitude and a political scope.
With this in mind, we visit the exhibition Digues, cosa. Joan Brossa i els poemes objecte at the Centre de les Arts Lliures de la Fundació Joan Brossa, followed by a visit to the exhibition André du Colombier: A Lyrical Point of Vie, at the Museu Tàpies. While on this walk from one institution to the other, artist Estel Boada will enliven a mediation proposal related to objects. The activity concludes with an aperitif on the Museu Tàpies terrace.
Participants can come dressed as objects or bring a personal object.

Guided by Estel Boada, Sílvia Galí and Maria Sellarès

Opening of the exhibition “Antoni Tàpies. The Perpetual Movement of the Wall”
2026-02-13 19:00 - 21:00
NEW DATA
The Museu Tàpies will officially open the new exhibition, Antoni Tàpies. The Perpetual Movement of the Wall, on Friday, February 13, 2026, at 7:00 p.m. The opening event is free and open to the public; no prior reservation is required. The exhibition will run until September 6, 2026, offering the public the opportunity to explore a pivotal moment in the work of Antoni Tàpies.
The monographic project will consist of an exploration of the artist’s work on the basis of his exhibition contexts and forms. The project takes as its object of study four exhibitions staged by Antoni Tàpies in the decade, each with very different sets of his work, and also set up in different ways. The divergence between these approaches, as well as the particular vicissitudes of the organisation of each of them, will make it possible to relate Tàpies’ output in each case with wider debates about modern architecture, industry, graphic design and editorial composition, urban space and certain ways of life at the time.
The exhibition is curated by Imma Prieto, director of the Museu Tàpies, and Pablo Allepuz, head of collection at the museum.
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[Image: Antoni Tàpies, El foc encantat de Farefa, 1949. Private Collection, Barcelona. © Comissió Tàpies / VEGAP, 2026.]
