Review: Body of Work - Antoni Tàpies's later work
On show now at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies is a series of figurative works by the eponymous artist that were created during his later years.
One thinks usually of Tàpies as an abstract artist, so it is refreshing to view this examination of his figurative work. His deeply incised lines within the plaster-and-sand matrix serve him well as he explores the human figure. His subtractive techniques of gouging and scraping his medium are used to create the most basic human forms—a naval, a vagina, a mouth—while letting his abstracted shapes and earthy palette swirl around them. Wonderful images prevail in the Tàpies Foundation’s galleries, from the painting of horizontally stacked-up limbs that ambiguously form a pattern across the panel (Members, 2002) to works on paper like the Skull of 2010, which cannot be dismissed as the likely musing of an 87-year-old on the final chapter of his life.
It is extraordinary to see the late work of a man in his dotage still so obsessed with human sexuality. The exhibition covers the last 13 years of his active creative life, starting at age 75 and ending shortly before his death at 88 earlier this year. The rear gallery is filled with Tàpies’s exploration of the use of latex as a medium, specifically how it mimics the colour and texture of freshly ejaculated sperm (Latex Series, 1999). Elsewhere, vaginas explode with activity and at least one panel suggests, in the boldest possible visual terms, with a brown-smeared newspaper beneath a splayed pair of legs, scat.
In spite of the strength of the paintings and drawings, I actually prefer Tàpies’s three-dimensional work, which is richly represented in Barcelona by installations such as his Homage to Picasso at Ciutadella park and the large over-the-entrance assemblage at MACBA. One of his most successful works is the oversized sock on the terrace level of the Tàpies Foundation called Mitjó. The metal sculpture betrays a sly sense of humour creeping into his often sombre work. Tàpies’s frayed sock seems to be channelling Claus Oldenberg, and while it is not a part of the figurative exhibition downstairs, it does meet its theme handily, or footily. Mitjó was supposed to be a colossal installation in the central courtyard of MNAC as part of the 1992 Olympics, but a conservative board of directors shot the idea down. That decision turned out to be Barcelona’s loss, but the maquette survives and the 1991 piece was installed at the Tàpies Foundation when it re-opened in 2010. Its twisted metal interior, which protrudes here and there from the sock shape, shares a lively dialogue with Cloud and Chair (1990), on the Foundation’s rooftop.
On the other hand, there is a category of Tàpies’s oeuvre that falls completely flat, at least for me. Among the works currently on view in the galleries are several that combine found objects with his more usual manipulation of paint and plaster. The pile of underwear that forms the lower design of one ‘painting’ looks like a failed attempt at Sixties’ Beat assemblage, and elsewhere, the inclusion of three-dimensional elements, such as black cords for armpit hair, or an out-of-scale pair of panties wrapped around the leg of one of the Legs (2001) make these works looks amateurish. Art history will not look kindly on this kind of art school experimentation, which may come to be viewed as a decline in the late work of a great artist.
Antoni Tàpies—Caps braços cames cos. Fundació Antoni Tàpies. Until November 4th. www.fundaciotapies.org