Exhibition Antoni Tàpies. “El movimiento perpetuo del muro”

Data & schedule:

Tuesday to Saturday, from 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Sunday, from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

Location: 

Museu Tàpies ( c. Aragó, 255, Barcelona)

The exhibition Antoni Tàpies. The Perpetual Movement of the Wall explores the artist’s evolution throughout the 1950s through the lens of exhibition formats and contexts, as well as gallery display strategies, circulation in publications, and reception by critics and the public. Continuing the research initiated in 2025 with the exhibition Antoni Tàpies. The Imagination of the World, which focused on the artist’s early years of production, this project offers new perspectives on a period of significant transformation in Tàpies’s practice, with the aim of viewing his work from different vantage points.

The exhibition provides an in-depth look at this evolution through the way Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, 1923–2012) presented his work in his solo exhibitions, focusing on four case studies (Galerías Layetanas, 1950 and 1954; Galerie Stadler, Paris, 1956; and Sala Gaspar, 1960). These four exhibitions, held in commercial galleries and organized without the involvement of a curator, show how Tàpies presented his work as something both new and, at the same time, recognizable.

The exhibition seeks to partially reconstruct these historic exhibitions in order to examine specific aspects of the works from a contemporary perspective through the analysis of their original installations, revealing the narratives embedded in the presentation of Tàpies’s work. Each of the four sections into which the project is divided combines a reconstruction of those exhibitions—through the color of the walls, the display devices documented in photographs, reproduced formats, modes of presentation, and so on—with contextual material, including documents directly or indirectly related to those exhibitions. Ultimately, it is an exhibition of exhibitions.