ANTONI TÀPIES

Born in Barcelona in 1923, Tàpies was a self-taught artist who developed a unique visual language centering on exchanges among symbols, gestures, and materials. The artist—who was also a celebrated theorist and philosopher—incorporated signs and symbols from Catalonia and other cultures into his paintings, collages, and sculptures, imbuing his work with historical allusions and odes to phenomena of the natural world. Replete with personal resonances and references to political and social struggles in his native Catalonia and Spain, his art made radical aesthetic propositions during the postwar era.

Over the course of his seven-decade career, Tàpies investigated abstract and surrealist forms using unconventional, raw materials. His combinations of media as diverse as wood, dirt, spray paint, cardboard, blankets, clothes, carpet, furniture, and marble dust reflect the intensely experimental ethos of his process. Tàpies forged complex layers of materials like these, bringing striking amalgams of color and texture to the fore of his compositions. In this way, enactments of transformation and transfiguration animated the spirit of all his work as an artist.

Pace’s exhibition of Tàpies’s works on paper, the gallery’s twelfth exhibition dedicated to the artist since it began representing him in 1992, will shed new light on the ways that drawing functioned in his practice—as a medium through which he could narrate his own experiences and express the poetic and fragile dimensions of the human condition. Featuring a large selection of works produced between the start of his career in the 1940s and the final years of his life, this presentation will trace the development of his visual lexicon, which reflects his deep interest in signs and symbols from Eastern religions and philosophies, particularly Buddhism. They also speak to the connections between Tàpies and his American contemporaries at the forefront of Abstract Expressionism—importantly, the artist began showing with Martha Jackson Gallery in New York the year it opened in 1953, during the early years of his career, and he presented solo exhibitions with the storied American gallery until 1978.

Tàpies’s reimagination and redefinition of painting as a highly physical undertaking would inspire future generations of artists. Notably, in 1993—the same year he mounted his first solo show with Pace—he was chosen to represent Spain at the 45th edition of the Venice Biennale, when he won the Golden Lion for his large-scale installation titled Rinzen. In 1984, the artist established the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona—which opened a museum and library in 1990—to support the exhibition of his work and that of other modern and contemporary artists. Along with the Fundació Joan Miró and Museu Picasso, the Fundació Antoni Tàpies remains a key cultural institution in the fabric of the Spanish city.

Today, his work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museo Guggenheim, Bilbao; Tate, London; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Kunstmuseum Basel; the Städel Museum, Frankfurt; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and many other international institutions.

Concurrently with Pace’s exhibition in New York, Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World is on view at the Museu Tàpies in Barcelona through January 25, 2026.