Antoni Tàpies: The Perpetual Movement of the Wall Exhibition
Museu Tàpies, Barcelona
February 12 – September 06, 2026

The Museu Tàpies presents the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Perpetual Movement of the Wall. The project explores the artist’s work over the decade of the 1950s. On the basis of its contexts and the ways it was exhibited, it generates a vision that goes beyond the work of art taken individually to analyse the context of its original presentation. It takes as case studies four exhibitions staged by Antoni Tàpies in the decade in Barcelona and Paris, each with very different selections of his work, and also set up in different ways.

“It feels as if I’m still experiencing the day of my first opening. I see the dark gallery after crossing the bookshop, where I often said hello to Salvat Papasseit’s widow, who worked there. Some friends came along, and the buyer of the only picture sold in the whole exhibition was the old father of my friends the Samaranchs. But above all, I remember my secret love came with her family, going on to dinner at Can Ventura, where my future father-in-law paid for us, helping to fill that awful emptiness that I’ve always felt after an exhibition, after seeing what remains of so much effort and so many hopes”. M.T.

The divergence between these expository approaches, as well as the particular vicissitudes of the development of each, makes it possible to relate Tàpies’ work to wider debates about architecture, industry, graphic design, the city space and ways of life at the time, and to how they relate to the perceived experience. Antoni Tàpies: The Perpetual Movement of the Wall explores the development of the artist’s work over the decade of the 1950s, on the basis of forms and contexts of exhibitions, as well as the ways they were presented at galleries, how they circulated in publications and how they were received and perceived by critics and the public.

Continuing the research begun in 2025 with the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World, which focused on the artist’s earliest work, the project presents new perspectives on a period of major changes in Tàpies’ artistic practice, with the aim of looking at his work from different standpoints. The exhibition makes it possible to explore this development on the basis of the way Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, 1923–2012) presented his work in individual exhibitions. It does this using four case studies (Galeries Laietanes, 1950 and 1954; Galerie Stadler, París, 1956; and Sala Gaspar, 1960) in which Tàpies, without the figure of the curator, presented himself each time as something new but at the same time with something that made him recognisable.

The exhibition is complemented by a leaflet with articles by the curators and period pieces by art critic Alexandre Cirici i Pellicer, art theorist Joan-Josep Tharrats and French art critic Michel Tapié, as well as a letter to the editor of the newspaper El Correo Catalán. As Imma Prieto, director of Museu Tàpies and co-curator of the exhibition, points, “thus, the interaction between work, wall and viewer not only conditions how the painting is seen, but also reconfigures its meaning. The work ceases to stand as an autonomous, isolated object and becomes an active element within a complex relational system that includes the viewer’s corporeality, the architecture of the exhibition and curating practices”. The aim of this exhibition at the Museu Tàpies is to partially reconstruct these historical exhibitions in order to focus on specific issues in his work from the point of view of the present, through analysis of how historical exhibitions were set up, to bring out the narratives implicit in the presentation of Tapies’ work.

As Pablo Allepuz, joint curator of the exhibition and head of collection at the Museu Tàpies, points out in his article, “factors considered trivial, like the composition and colour of the display surfaces, the mechanisms of the physical layout of the works, decisions on lighting techniques and communicative resources actually made up a whole structure of mediation that affects or even determines how we see and consider Tàpies’ legacy today”. Thus, each of the four parts into which the project on show at the Museu Tàpies is divided presents on the one hand a reconstruction of these presentations in terms of the colour of the walls, the way things were photographed or the formats reproduced, the way in which they were approached, and so on and on the other documents linked directly or indirectly to these exhibitions. In short, an exhibition of exhibitions.

more. www.museutapies.org