A self-taught artist as well as a theorist and philosopher, Antoni Tàpies’ exhibition at Pace Gallery features twenty paintings that explore his unique artistic language through the themes of materiality and cultural allusions. The work in the exhibition represents Tàpies’s interest in sex, defiance, death, erasure, and the aging body through time. During his seven-decade career, Tàpies’ work employs an amalgamation of physical materials as well as symbols of spirituality gathered from Eastern and Western cultures. Additionally, many of these pieces allude to both his personal and political difficulties in his native Catalonia. Using various media and gestures, he experiments with atypical processes through layering with striking textures and color. Media such as dirt, cardboard, fabrics, furniture, or spray paint are evident within the work, and his highly physical processes and explorations of textures, materiality, and color are explored in various pieces. For example, his painting “Manta amb petjades,” in 2001, features a blanket glued on wood. Tàpies utilizes the natural folds of the blanket and retains the materiality of this media even after gluing it onto the wooden board. The contrast between the organic blanket and the wooden board and the jarring black paint layered above the material exemplifies Tàpies’ inclination to play with different, physical media. Overall, this exhibition highlights his raw explorations and exposes viewers to physical approaches to art-making.
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I feel that you captured the importance that materiality holds within Tápies' work really well. Your detailed description of his work "Manta amb petjades", was vivid. I also thought the transition from background and influence to process was smooth. You mentioned his "highly physical process," and I remember the large scale of his works. It may have been helpful to include a detail about that amongst your other descriptions of the work.
ReplyDeleteThe detail in which you went into is great. I can imagine these encrusted
ReplyDeletecollage paintings in all their glory.
My main critique is organization of some of the sentence structure /
paragraph format.
Typically a topic sentence should encapsulate what you are about to say in
the paragraph. For this reason, your closing sentence might work a lot
better as the topic sentence for paragraph two.
Secondly, the first sentence:" A self-taught artist as well as a theorist
and philosopher, Antoni Tàpies’ exhibition in the Pace Gallery features
twenty paintings which pinpoints his unique artistic language through the
theme of transformation and his redefining of painting." Is great in it's
succintness in portraying the artist. But, I think you may want to consider
rearranging to :Antoni Tàpies, the self-taught artist, theorist and
philosopher... etc. Just because when you do that sort of sentence format
(there's a word for it that is slipping my mind..) where you add something
between commas to provide an alternate description of the subject, it
should be able to replace the said subject. In this case the subject is
Antonio's show, which isn't a self taught artist, rather a show. I hope I'm
making sense!! It could also just be better flow if broken into a couple
sentences.
Enjoyed reading this and loved this exhibit as well!