Antoni Tàpies — Creus — Lelong & Co Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 17 → May 7, 2022

The act of intersecting two lines is considered to be one of humanity’s first written signs. The cross is a constant presence in the work of Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012). The artist was fascinated by invariables that permeate human history, art in its diverse places, the echoes that can be felt between a prehistoric cave marking, a Christian symbol, graffiti on a wall, even the letter T (the initial of Tàpies and Teresa, his wife), this Phoenician tau that was adopted by the Greeks and then the Latin languages. In Tàpies’ work, where fragments of bodies and familiar objects abound, sometimes the cross is associated with a leg, a mouth, a head, becomes the structure of a wooden panel; it is the mark that obscures or underlines, joins or opposes, juxtaposes or additions.

This exhibition, through a selection of works spanning six decades (from 1960 to 2011), including papers, collages, paintings and sculpture, examines Tàpies’ use of the cross, creus in Catalan.

Antoni Tàpies was born in 1923 in Barcelona and died in 2012. An exhibition, Melancholia, dedicated to his works from the early 90s, will open on 16 March at the Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona. A major museum retrospective is being prepared in Madrid to mark, in 2023-2024, the centenary of the artist’s birth.