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拍品专文
Initials (1960) belongs to Antoni Tàpies’ signature series of ‘matter paintings,’ which explored the expressive and alchemical possibilities of matter with single-minded and forensic concern. The canvas is lent a near-sculptural sense of relief by thick swathes of oil paint and layers of sand, which encrust its surface. The artist’s initials dominate the composition, interlinked in the style of Northern Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer. Like an enigmatic rune carved in stone, Tàpies’ signature monogram emerges from the painted ground as though unearthed. Tactile ridges of matter, imprinted with small nicks and deftly incised carvings, transform the canvas—no longer a window onto the world but a timeworn fragment of the world itself. Exhibited in 1961 at Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, Initials dates to an important period of acclaim for the artist. The following year his first retrospective exhibitions opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover and Kunsthaus Zurich.
Born in Barcelona, as a child Tàpies witnessed firsthand the ravages of the Spanish Civil War, and the brutal collapse of Catalonian autonomy under General Franco. His father was an ardent Catalan nationalist, who showed the young Tàpies the vital proof of the Catalonian fight for sovereignty, embedded in the worn patina of its old stone walls. In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War Tàpies understood the cracked, crumbling surfaces of Barcelona to embody the violence his city had endured, a record written in script-like cavities, gashes and abrasions. The artist’s surname is derived from the Catalan word ‘tàpia,’ meaning ‘wall,’ and in the present work Tàpies pulls strips of paint from the canvas, sgraffito-like, to reveal his own monogram in the sand layer beneath. The semiotic play effected through this doubling—the artist’s written name embedded within its own physical manifestation, in the form of the canvas-as-wall—imbues Initials with an inherent, talismanic power, while at the same time carrying the poignant suggestion of the artist as one with his city.
Throughout the 1950s Tàpies travelled widely. Across Europe, artists and writers were confronting the political and philosophical problems of a continent torn apart by the violence of the Second World War. Tàpies himself had been profoundly shaken by the use of the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which affirmed to him that energy originated in matter. Incorporating natural materials such as marble dust and sand, and inspired by the expressive potency of the American Abstract Expressionist painters whom he encountered during repeated visits to New York throughout the decade, Tàpies began to forge his iconic canvases, becoming a leading figure within Europe’s Art Informel movement. He later reflected that as Franco’s Spain endured around him, the bodies of matter he manipulated on canvas were a site of protest, a means of unleashing his ‘restrained anger against oppression and forced silence’ (A. Tàpies, A Personal Memoir: Fragments for an Autobiography, Barcelona 2009, p. 335).
Widely read in art, Surrealism, psychoanalysis, Eastern mysticism, and Existentialist and Romantic thought, Tàpies’ ‘matter paintings’ draw on myriad sources spanning Eastern calligraphy, Western graffiti, and the private alphabet of thirteenth-century Catalonian mystic Ramon Llull. He sought to evolve a kind of ‘metapainting,’ surpassing mere representation to convey meaning intrinsically in the material properties of the work itself. Thus, with humble materials, Tàpies forged a transcendental new art form, unleashing the powerful metaphysical charge embedded in the terrestrial world. With Initials, Tàpies leaves a trace of his own name on the walls of art history.
Born in Barcelona, as a child Tàpies witnessed firsthand the ravages of the Spanish Civil War, and the brutal collapse of Catalonian autonomy under General Franco. His father was an ardent Catalan nationalist, who showed the young Tàpies the vital proof of the Catalonian fight for sovereignty, embedded in the worn patina of its old stone walls. In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War Tàpies understood the cracked, crumbling surfaces of Barcelona to embody the violence his city had endured, a record written in script-like cavities, gashes and abrasions. The artist’s surname is derived from the Catalan word ‘tàpia,’ meaning ‘wall,’ and in the present work Tàpies pulls strips of paint from the canvas, sgraffito-like, to reveal his own monogram in the sand layer beneath. The semiotic play effected through this doubling—the artist’s written name embedded within its own physical manifestation, in the form of the canvas-as-wall—imbues Initials with an inherent, talismanic power, while at the same time carrying the poignant suggestion of the artist as one with his city.
Throughout the 1950s Tàpies travelled widely. Across Europe, artists and writers were confronting the political and philosophical problems of a continent torn apart by the violence of the Second World War. Tàpies himself had been profoundly shaken by the use of the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which affirmed to him that energy originated in matter. Incorporating natural materials such as marble dust and sand, and inspired by the expressive potency of the American Abstract Expressionist painters whom he encountered during repeated visits to New York throughout the decade, Tàpies began to forge his iconic canvases, becoming a leading figure within Europe’s Art Informel movement. He later reflected that as Franco’s Spain endured around him, the bodies of matter he manipulated on canvas were a site of protest, a means of unleashing his ‘restrained anger against oppression and forced silence’ (A. Tàpies, A Personal Memoir: Fragments for an Autobiography, Barcelona 2009, p. 335).
Widely read in art, Surrealism, psychoanalysis, Eastern mysticism, and Existentialist and Romantic thought, Tàpies’ ‘matter paintings’ draw on myriad sources spanning Eastern calligraphy, Western graffiti, and the private alphabet of thirteenth-century Catalonian mystic Ramon Llull. He sought to evolve a kind of ‘metapainting,’ surpassing mere representation to convey meaning intrinsically in the material properties of the work itself. Thus, with humble materials, Tàpies forged a transcendental new art form, unleashing the powerful metaphysical charge embedded in the terrestrial world. With Initials, Tàpies leaves a trace of his own name on the walls of art history.