Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World

How is life being thought on? Which imaginaries stimulate the Tapian legacy? Combinatory art, a Llullian idea, is based on the ability to combine different knowledge and skills. This idea becomes a metaphor for this exhibition when thinking about 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 fifties. 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.

[Image: Antoni Tàpies. Paisatge transformat, 1947. Private collection, Barcelona © Comissió Tàpies / VEGAP, 2025]