The exhibition, Image, Body, Pathos, opens at 4 pm Saturday March 17 at Reykjavik Art Museum/Kjarvalsstaðir.
The exhibition consists of paintings on canvas or wood (mostly mixed media) from 1958 to the present day. Included in the exhibition are many of Tàpies’s key work that exemplifies his unique use of materials. The exhibition is on display until 13 May.
The exhibition focus
Thematically, the exhibition focuses on the double perspective of body-image and the body of the image. The human body does not appear in Tàpies’s paintings as representational portraits but as imprints, symbolic suggestions, relief-like plasticity or through the integration of personal items, such as clothes. With his “material paintings,” Tàpies uses the physical characteristics of the materials to investigate the self. His paintings develop in a dialogue with his own body but the outcome is new pictorial corporeality, where the paintings themselves appear as material “bodies”, with life of their own.
The exhibition was curated by Dr. Eva Schmidt, Director of the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen in Germany, and has been developed in close cooperation with the artist and the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona. It is sponsored by The Honorary Consul of Spain in Iceland and The Embassy of Spain in Norway.
About Antoni Tàpies
When the Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) died earlier this year at the age of 88, he was hailed as "the last great artist of the 20th century." The reason was the decisive influence of his “material paintings” on the development of contemporary art. His use of sand, cement, paste, granite dust and objects of every-day use inspired generations of artists and changed the way artists think of painting.
Source: Reykjavik Art Museum/Kjarvalsstaðir