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Què fem?, 1974 196 x 391 cm Técnica mixta sobre tela montada sobre madera Cortesía de la Galería Elvira González

Antoni Tàpies. 60s & 70s

Galería Elvira González (Madrid, Spain) hosts the exhibition Antoni Tàpies. 60s & 70s, featuring a selection of works made in the two decades spanning the sixties and seventies by the master of Spanish informalismo and one of the truly seminal names in contemporary art in Europe.

On view at the gallery until 31 March 2012, the exhibition includes large-format mixed media works on various supports from this decisive phase in the artist’s production.

In the 1940s and 50s, Tàpies introduced the subjects, themes and tropes he was to explore throughout the remainder of his career. As he himself maintains, it was in the late 1950s when he started to find his stride as a mature artist. As he mined the possibilities of this adopted vernacular, Tàpies' signature style gelled in the 1960s and 70s, the two key decades under the spotlight in the exhibition at Galería Elvira González.

At the end of the 1950s and throughout the following decade Tàpies started to play with texture, creating his acclaimed "matter-based" works, coupling this exploration of texture with new iconographic motifs, graphemes, footprints and the prints of his own hands on the canvas.

Tàpies co-opted everyday objects and inserted them in his paintings, transmuting them in the process into something else. Akin to an alchemist, Tàpies took perishable, lowly materials and imbued them with new life within the work, conferring them a hitherto unknown permanence and nobility. This fondness for transformation was clearly influenced by Zen, a philosophy the artist was conversant with and which taught him how to lend new meaning to disregarded and overlooked materials. Tàpies’ new treatment of materials also coincides in time with the expansion of arte povera in Europe, and post-minimalism and conceptualism in the USA.

In his work from the 1960s and 70s we perceive not only an assuredness in the handling of the form, but also an ideological shift. From the mid 60s well into the 70s, the final years of Franco's regime, his work took on a decidedly political slant.

Date: until March 3.
Location: Galería Elvira González. c/ General Castaños, 3 28004. Madrid. Spain.
Opening hours: from Mondy to Friday, from 10.30am to 7.30pm. Saturdays, from 11am to 2pm.