The Hungarian National Gallery’s latest cabinet exhibition presents a selection of prints by Antoni Tàpies, one of the leading Spanish-Catalan visual artists of the second half of the twentieth century.
Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) was a versatile artist: throughout his career, he not only produced paintings, sculptures, ceramics, prints and book illustrations, but also gained significant renown as the author of theoretical writings alongside his work in the visual arts. Although he is known primarily for his paintings and monumental still lifes, his work in printmaking is a defining aspect of his oeuvre. His prints are independent works that developed in parallel with his painting, featuring the same motifs, symbols and philosophical questions as those found on his canvases.
At the very beginning of his career, Antoni Tàpies showed an interest primarily in Surrealism; then, in the early 1950s, he turned towards abstraction, which he imbued with symbolic meaning. Although his works can be likened to the Informel movement that was gaining ground during this period, the Catalan artist developed a distinctly unique artistic style in which ephemeral, everyday objects and materials played a prominent compositional role. Tàpies sought forms of expression that went beyond the apparent connection with abstraction. Breaking with the traditional painting surface, he incorporated sand, marble dust, earth, plaster, straw and various industrial materials into his works. The canvas thus took on a thick, cracked texture reminiscent of a wall. He applied scratches, incisions, imprints and marks to the surface, symbolising the passage of time and the traces of human presence.
Through his works, Tàpies sought to establish a harmonious relationship between figurative and abstract art, and to articulate a universal message accessible to all. He sought a mode of expression that transcends the reality interpretable by the eye – he sought and explored what might bring us closer to the experience of existence, to the realm of feelings arising from within. His works offer the viewer a profound, ancient, spiritual experience, urge them to experience reality contemplatively, and encourage them to reflect on the essence of art. Eastern philosophies served as a source of inspiration and a spiritual compass for him. In the creative process, he considered spontaneous, concentrated gestures to be important, striving for simplicity – a key characteristic of Zen art – and the fact that the artist creates the work in a meditative state with a single, unaltered movement.
The spontaneous symbols, numbers and letters appearing in his pictures have often been compared to the automatic writing practised by the Surrealists; however, Tàpies distanced himself from this artistic movement from an early age. For him, they were expressions of spontaneity and a state of deep inspiration, which most frequently appear in his prints and resemble ciphers, cryptographs or a game through which he sought to express an invisible inner reality, whilst attempting to unravel their connections using pictorial means.
His work in printmaking is one of the most important, yet least emphasised, areas of his oeuvre. Although he is known primarily for his paintings and monumental material studies, printmaking and artist’s books played an equally significant role in his artistic thinking. His prints are not incidental or ancillary works but independent creations that developed in parallel with his painting, in which the same motifs, symbols and philosophical questions appear as on his canvases. He was particularly drawn to the materiality and physical nature of printmaking techniques. He did not treat the copper plate as a traditional, precise engraving surface, but worked on it with the same aggressive, experimental attitude as on his canvases: he scratched, etched, punched holes in and deformed it. In his own words, the acid or the scratching was a means of “attacking” the material. He was therefore not interested in printmaking techniques as reproductive processes, but as opportunities for direct physical engagement with the material.