“Against the Wall” series

The Against the Wall series of encounters is part of the exhibition project Antoni Tàpies: The Perpetual Movement of the Wall, extending its question marks to the present. Setting out from an analysis of the contexts and forms of exhibition of Tàpies’ work in the 1950s, the programme sets out to activate the wall not just as a formal or architectural feature, but also as a sensitive, cultural and political device that structures the relationship between artwork, body and space.

In those years, the wall became more than just a pictorial medium for Tàpies: it was an active surface on which gestures, memories and tensions are inscribed, but also a point of contact with modern architecture, graphic design, industry and the changing cityscape. The different setup solutions explored by the artist in his individual exhibitions in the fifties show just how far exhibition conditions form part of the very meaning of the artwork, and how the work dialogues with specific ways of living, of producing culture and of seeing the world.

Taking this as its starting point, the series —moderated by arts journalist Clàudia Rius— offers a series of contemporary dialogues between artists and agents in the art system working today with related concerns: matter and its symbolic baggage, the relation between art and architecture, the presence of the body, the affective dimension of the exhibition space and the ability of the wall to work as frontier, medium, skin and place for resistance. Far from a closed historiographic reading, the encounters activate Tàpies’ work as a resonant field through which to think about current practices to produce, exhibit and mediate art.

Each encounter deals with the wall from a specific point of view —material fragility, the skin of the artwork, the body and affect— but all of them share the intention of questioning the limits between object and venue, between intimacy and the public sphere, between institutionalisation and sensitive experience. In this respect, the series sees the wall as a place of friction and shared imagination, able to condense conflicts, desires and ways of relating that run through both Tàpies’ work and contemporary artistic practices.

At a time when the role of the exhibition space is once again subject to revision —in terms of its material, symbolic and political conditions—, Against the Wall sets out to build bridges between past and present, between the debates that marked a key period in artistic modernity and the questions that today face artists, institutions and audiences. Far from being a fixed boundary, the wall is thus presented as a place in perpetual movement.

Programme

Encounter 1. With Lucía C. Pino and Prats Nogueras Blanchard

Date: Tuesday 10 March 2026

Encounter 2. With Marria Pratts and Galeria Mayoral (Jordi Mayoral)

Date: Tuesday 14 April 2026

Encounter 3. With Eva Fàbregas and Bombon Projects (Joana Roda)

Date: Tuesday 12 May 2026