Antoni Tpies.

The Places of Art

5 March 2 May 2010

The main feature of the exhibition with which the Fundaci reopens its doors after its architectural reform is the fact that it transcends disciplines, periods and geographies. It is presented in various parts of the Fundaci and embraces the complexity and plurality of interests in Antoni Tpies work, from a selection of his pictorial work of the last twenty years, with a number of counterpoints of more remote works that are their embryo, including a fragment of what he called his manifest and his museum,1 which corresponds to the spiritual and artistic setting of three thousands years of friendship,2 a long search for values that go beyond aesthetics.
In the first place

Level -2 (Space D) The basement of the Fundaci displays a selection of works ranging from ancient Egyptian to modern western art, from ritual objects to scientific books. These works do not only constitute the artists living environment: they are closely related to his way of conceiving art, and represent a heterodox interrogation concerning its origins, history and meaning.
In the second place

Level 1 (Space A) and Level -1 (Space B) This exhibition of Antoni Tpies works is based in particular on a selection of the pieces he has created in the last twenty years, pieces that open up a path from an inner light and from a memory of gesture: a trajectory of over sixty-five years of uninterrupted work that has enabled him, in maturity, to continue creating powerful images that are still imbued with magic, expressiveness and rebellion. The exhibition commences with a work from the summer of 1945, with the apprentice painter who questions the social function of art and the motivations of the artist, and who poses himself all manner of existential doubts (a questioning that, over the years, will become the touchstone of an artistic production that is as expansive in variety as it is in time).
1. Antoni Tpies, El arte y sus lugares, Madrid: Siruela, 1999, p. 11. 2. Antoni Tpies, 3.000 ans damiti/Tres mil anys damistat, Vogue, December 1991 January 1992.

Female figure of Spedos II type Cyclades Islands, Greece C. 2400 B.C. White marble 40 cm

Catalan Romanesque virgin Second half of 12th century Polychromed wood 82 cm

Francisco de Zurbarn Fraile mercedario en prisin (Mercedary Friar in Prison) 17th century Oil on canvas 62 x 41 cm

Nagalila Yantra Rajasthan, India 18th century (Mogul Empire) Ink and watercolour on paper 29.3 x 22.5 cm

Marcel Duchamp Rotorelief 1935 Printed paperboard disc 24.9 cm (diameter)

Andreas Cellarius Harmonia macrocosmica seu Atlas universalis et novus, totius universi creati cosmographiam generalem, et novam exhibens (Harmony of the macrocosmos or new universal Atlas containing the new general cosmography of all the created universe) Amstelodami (Amsterdam) Printed by Joannes Janssonius 1661 51.8 x 34 x 7.5 cm

Ramon Llull Ars magna Barcelona Pere Posa 1501 30.3 x 21.5 x 2.3 cm

Calligraphic tree India 19th century Paint on canvas 73.5 x 92 cm

Henri Michaux (Untitled) C. 1960 Ink on paper 57 x 77 cm

Demon mask (tengu) for bugaku dance Japan 12th century (end of the Heian period) Wood and pigment 27 cm

In the first place

The Fundaci Antoni Tpies was opened in 1990 with the aim of studying the role of art in the constitution of the modern consciousness. Twenty years later, the Fundaci is reopening its doors after two years of architectural reforms with the presentation of a fragment of the constitution of the consciousness of Antoni Tpies the man and the modern painter. As if it were an X-ray, a cut made in an organism, this first fragment displays a part of this body that is the collection of associated objects Tpies has brought together over the years: In contrast with other similar anthologies, this is constructed from my own artistic evolution, that is, from my need to explain to myself the personal concerns I have dealt with during more than fifty years of everyday work.1 Genealogy The three thousand years of friendship and this anthology began eighty-six years ago, or even earlier, in a family characterised by erudition and marked by the geo-political circumstances of the time. It is not vacuous to relocate the presentation of a part of the artworks that not only surround but also inhabit and possess Antoni Tpies in the narration of his history, of his genesis as a man and an artist. He himself, in Memria personal. Fragment per a una autobiografia (1977), refers to this family genealogy, which is inseparable from his literary and aesthetic discoveries. The references to objects and books trace the rhythm of the youngsters spiritual development. Tpies constrictive experiences of religious education and the fascinating insights into magic and dreams, added to his successive illnesses, reinforced his private feelings of strangeness. These illnesses would be alleviated by his explorations of the familys collections of objects and books. In his early childhood the Spanish Republic was being consolidated, and to the now-legendary discovery of the magazine DAc i dAll, of the cinema and other magazines, there would be added magic and books. Books that ranged from Ecclesiastes to the writings of Karl Marx, which his father consulted to prepare his lectures.

1. Antoni Tpies, El arte y sus lugares, Madrid: Siruela, 1999, p. 11.

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The relationship with life and death, and with religions and political dogmas, were the framework for the formation of his identity prior to the artist he would become. He mentions his parents as an example of the reconciliation between the dominant religion in Spain and the struggles for the freedom of Catalonia in the 1930s. A family that was gripped by the transformation of values and rules in a society that would lead to the Second Republic, proclaimed in 1931 and that would dramatically witness the destruction of this ideal. In a sick society, Antoni Tpies ailing body looked to an inner world perturbed by religious rites and objects. Confronted with himself literally, following the painting of his self-portraits in 1944, while convalescing he saw the world, and gathered together its everyday objects and the beings that were closest to him. Oriental references offered a framework for thought for the young man tormented by his relationship with things: an aesthetic and ethical framework that preceded the birth of the Catholic religion itself. He would be captivated by another strange and fabulous world, from Mesopotamia to ancient Greece by way of shamanic practices and mediums, in a tireless quest for elusive truths. If there was another world of forms, of objects related with the existing world and objects related with the Beyond, why should he unquestioningly accept what was imposed by the Church? Tpies placed the Catholic religion in doubt, and finally abandoned it altogether. The associations he created through his readings and his philosophical and aesthetic explorations, between the aesthetic productions of other far-off lands, from the present or the past, and the sciences, and modern art, are found again in the magazines he perused from his childhood until he chose to become an artist, and subsequently with Rvolution surraliste, Documents and Minotaure, among others. Within this vision, Antoni Tpies has conceived his work and still does as a means of broadening his knowledge, a way of sharing his questions and answers with everyone. He believes in art as a vector of relationship with the world, a bond and a place joining what is real and what is unreal, but also as a means of resistance against political, aesthetic or ethical impositions. Artworks In 1955, what Tpies expected of art was a shock, a commotion for the public. Later, when he questioned himself about what traditions and schools had influenced him personally and therefore his work, he asserted his identification with the tireless, restless rupture of the
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avant-gardes: a free expression that defends its origin in the Oriental masters of the past who formed the central axis of their society and represented an art that rejected the idea of a progress that would construct the new on the basis of destroying the old. We have now arrived, then, at the crucial point where we seek the origin, the moment when the boy, the teenage Antoni Tpies creates himself, places himself within an artistic genealogy of the past and the future, and from here, by association, at the manner in which he has constituted himself as an artist, has produced art, has surrounded himself with art, with science, with literature, because this was what he was becoming, what he was and wanted to be. The artworks gathered together in the exhibition that make up part of his habitat are his double, his mirror and, after a fashion, his ideal history. He is possessed by an ancestral history, and he possesses it in return, since, as he says, artworks have to become everyday objects, handled and studied. This culture, this collection, is the result of a construction, an acquisition of an origin: an origin for himself and for his work, because the artists spirit and thoughts must come from somewhere. He thinks and expresses himself within a system of thought that goes beyond frameworks of space and time, but above all he does so from the particular standpoint of a life situated in his own time. This association of works juxtaposes time and places. If we make an inventory of the pieces, we observe a majority of nonwestern objects and works: a majority of old, non-western works that nevertheless are often associated with a modern western artwork, a painting or various paintings. And always with a link to an ancient work. On a table in the library, a wooden Catalan Romanesque virgin stands beside a warrior from an ancient civilisation. Nearby, the Goddess of the Void. Tpies names the history, the authors, the references, the sources; he surrounds himself with them, he displays them and shares them. This unity of differences, this body, is a space for constructing a polyphonic discourse on art that interlaces the points of view of art, literature and science. An art that would never be separated, distanced from other subjects, and that entwines with esotericism, religions, the collective and individual unconscious, the sciences and all their representations. The Koran alongside the Bible. Courtly love, the thoughts of Bergson, Marie Curies investigations, and the anatomic drawings of Vesalius. Robert Fludds infinity is not far removed from Duchamps breast
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on the cover of Le Surralisme en 1947. The systems of representation of Anasthasius Kircher, of Ramon Llull, of the mandalas, and so on, every wall, every altarpiece in the exhibition or in the artist-collectors studio, echoes this cosmogony, this automatic association. In the same space as Francisco de Zurbarns stabbed friar, there is a goddess Shiva with her hands outstretched. And there, a Goya, and behind the Goya, Max Ernsts Une semaine de bont. It is not a question of assimilating non-western art into the history of art, but of incorporating art into the collection of gestures used by mankind in its dialogue with realities. In a number of his texts, Antoni Tpies recalls the magical, curative power of the artwork, but for him it is first and foremost a means of relating, of learning, of exploring and discovering himself and the world. The museum, the exhibition venue, displaces the objects, relocates them to give room for thought. This selection of works, then, gives us here for the first time the opportunity to explore a fragment of this body, this consciousness. Like a mutilation to a living being, this exhibition allows us to establish relationships between these objects, to come closer to acquiring an awareness (a collection, like an exhibition, removes the objects from their original habitat and function and permits new interpretations). The public will have access to a first approximation, an initial exhibition space of works, books and objects which, in contrast with their meaning in their customary habitat, with their associative and relational mechanism linked to the imagination and other psychic drives, come to form part, in being exhibited, of a repertoire, are named and are displayed in relation with a specific temporal and geographical origin, thus opening up a space of interrogation of and connection with the origins of art.

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In the second place

The early works from the years 1945-47, displayed on Level 1 of the Fundaci, reveal a strong primitivist nature, linked to Dada and infantile art or the art of the mentally ill, and therefore close to Art Brut. At the same time, these works which in some cases already foreshadow Tpies work with matter evidence a certain Symbolist character with regard to the importance this movement attributes to allegory, myth and metaphor. Symbolism had arrived in Catalonia with the Modernista (Art Nouveau) aesthetic in the late 19th century, and was made very visible in Barcelona by the Modernista architecture of numerous buildings in the city, particularly those of Antoni Gaud, Llus Domnech i Montaner and Josep Puig i Cadafalch. As occurs in the work of Antoni Tpies, the goal of the Symbolists was to express an ideal or an absolute truth to which access was gained through spirituality, the imagination and dreams. In this way, they endowed images or objects with a symbolic meaning by means of metaphor and suggestion. During these formative years, Antoni Tpies laid the foundations of a system of thought and creation that in time would become the touchstone of his artistic production. It is for this reason that the Fundaci displays a very brief sampling of works from this period as an introduction, beside a selection of works produced during the last twenty years, a period that coincides with the life of the Fundaci itself. The aim of this exhibition is to show that the works of the last twenty years display, in a certain manner, a reworking and reinterpretation of the works of the 1940s (self-portraits, references to death), as well as biographical shifts. One of these first self-portraits shows, at the same time, a young Tpies facing himself and criss-crossed by demons and symbols. The series of engravings made on the basis of Karl Marx, Histria Natural (Natural History),and the other drawings and canvases inspired in the Surrealist movement of the same period continued this exploration, terrifying and dazzling at the same time, of a world torn apart by war and Tpies own existential questions, a world that was also witnessing scientific discoveries and the artistic avant-gardes. The numerous motifs that would emerge in Tpies work during these early years of exploration of his being in the world as an artist would be repeated almost obsessively throughout his career. In all of his work, Tpies refers to the first stage described by the mystics, which consists in studying the infernal cycle before attaining serenity.
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Objects, parts of the body, would be represented in different ways according to the stages of the artists evolution, and would adopt and superimpose his successive aesthetic and spiritual affiliations: from the magic and mystery of appearances to a material presence that would take shape in the 1950s. Materials, objects, instead of being the representation of an idea, of a projection of themselves, become a presence, a reality of themselves. Magic and mimetics,2 alchemy and working with matter are two practices and two references in Tpies, transforming what is insignificant and everyday into art and allowing the structure of matter to live and appear, whether it be the walls made of marble dust, sand or earth of the 1950s or the varnishes of the 1980s, which we can find in the selection of works of the last twenty years. Body Antoni Tpies will always occupy a particular, tense place, which his work explores, between the storminess and violence of isolation and the quietude of contemplation. He lives and paints the dismembering of the body of art and the artist, as a transitional space, a space in transit located in the deepest, rawest reaches of the human condition and of the artist himself. In tune with his interest in the mystics, he identifies with their practice of uniting what is attractive with what is repulsive, in order to attain a state of contemplation. An art made up of debris, of everyday objects, of hieroglyphics, of sublimated, condensed waste materials placed at the very centre of art, of the history of art. Tpies also mentions the Oriental practices in which the sublime can be found in the smallest of things, in what is mundane or abject. This abjection disturbs order, system, identity. What is abject (to borrow Julia Kristevas definition) precedes signs and language. It speaks to us of what is unnameable, of the moment when the exterior and the interior form a single thing, mixing pleasure and pain. What is unnameable is this lack of distinction between outside and inside, between what is seen and what is felt. Uniting object and subject, Antoni Tpies often expresses the desire to strike his viewers both physically and visually. It is also a question of making them feel pain, of making them see it in order for

2. Manuel J. Borja-Villel,The Collection. Fundaci Antoni Tpies, Barcelona: Fundaci Antoni Tpies, 2004, pp. 26-95.

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them to recognise it, of making them see it in order to cure them. So it is not so much a matter of looking horror in the face severed torsos, heads and feet torn from the body and cast aside as of feeling the forces that pierce the body. The cuts, the wounds, the perforated skin of the canvas, mark the limits. The limits of the body or of the canvas. What is abject is enveloped by what is sublime.3 What is shown to us as cut, holed, liquefied, makes us perceive the boundaries between an ancestral, primitive, incorporate fear and an exterior that is known, delimited, named. Looking horror in the face can turn us to stone. Tpies combines the enjoyment of our contemplation of matter, of colour, and our fascination with sexes floating in matters bordering on the celestial, erect or open sexes in a liquefied varnish that represents bodies without heads, without organs. Bodies without organs, or rather without organisation, without organism, as opposed to the anatomical bodies of medicine, whose organs are identified and whose functions are enumerated. An intense and intensive body made up of variations, of vibrations, of fluctuations. A suitable definition for the varnishes that appear in the 1980s. These varnishes literally incarnate the liquid bodies that pour out and take shape on the canvas. Skin and canvas are one and the same thing. Gesture, calligraphy, writing the bodies unfold, deform. And here too, language, symbols, emerge once again, take possession of what is unnameable, of what is formless. The bodies are marked by crosses, letters, writings, figures. The canvas is trapped in the movement of creation and at the same time reminds us of the concreteness, the conditions of production of the work, the object made of canvas and wood that finally results from it, albeit sublimated. The works Cap i filferro (Head and Wire), from 1999, or Cos i filferro (Body and Wire), from 1996, use, for example, a wire that at the same time painfully pierces the canvas in braided form and the body or the head represented there. The bodies are cut, the wire wounds them and at the same time ties them to the support. The bodiless head is marked by a sign of possession and compassion: the cross, the + or the initials at. Most of the works exhibited here live in this back-and-forth movement between language, signs and corporate matter. The brutal wire that penetrates a sock (Mitj (Sock), model, 1991, a sculpture created and sited on the

3. Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de lhorreur. Paris: Seuil, 1980, p. 19.

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terrace of the Fundaci in 2010) can also rise up into a cloud set on top of this very building: Nvol i cadira (Cloud and Chair), 1990. Opposites always attract, coexist, tauten and complete each other. Archery The works selected here and the description given of them aim to exemplify a ritual. But a ritual without myth, without divinity; it is more a question of repeating gestures of common rituals. A body that walks around the canvas, approaches it, moves away from it to the sound of cracking fingers. Antoni Tpies, aged eighty-six, goes down to his workshop every day, and paints or draws, according to the seasons, ritually, calmly, cut-up bodies or signs of infinity: a spiral, a circle, a cross, a fingerprint, figures. Sometimes there is another moment of peace: a wave that washes away the signs and the scissors, three fingers that invite us to be silent and the rhythm is taken up again. The fingerprint turns into a sun, a puff of breath. Painting, drawing, as an everyday act, like eating when were hungry or sleeping when were tired. If we follow the advice of T. Suzuki in the prologue of Zen in der Kunst des Bogenschiessens (Zen in the Art of Archery), by Eugen Herrigel (1884-1955), a true master of archery has to become one with the target, and to do so he has to harmonise what is conscious and what is unconscious, eliminate the separation between the body and the object aimed at. As he says, it is a question of going beyond technique to demonstrate a knowledge, a practice that resides directly in the body, the head and the organs: His hands and feet are the brushes, and all the universe is the canvas on which he will paint his life for seventy, eighty or even ninety years. The picture so painted is named history. The hands, the feet, are freed from the dominion of the eye. In Antoni Tpies work, the feet walk over the canvases, the eyes are hands covered with paint. He practises a vision that discovers a function of touch.4 The eyes, the gaze, as in the self-portraits and faces of his early years, persist, as he himself says: I began painting eyes, and Ill finish painting eyes: eyes that paint. The materic paintings, like the bodies also, make us feel matter through our eyes. An earthy, physical matter, recorded in our memory thanks to games, work or

4. I speak with my hand, you listen with your eyes, Shitao (quotation taken from the chapter Tattooing and the body, El arte y sus lugares, Antoni Tpies, Madrid: Siruela, 1999).

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contemplation. The canvas or earth become magma that shakes or devours pieces of paper, that expels its own excrescences. A canvas, an earth, a bronze that, in turn, can swallow up the objects and petrify them forever. Here also, in this fluid, gripped, petrified matter, are engraved the signs of possession, of transcendence. In this way, the materic works of the 1950s and 1960s are traversed by their tremors and reveal bodies, or are even split open, marked. At the same time Tpies shows the matter, allows it to manifest itself, and then he repeats the gesture of marking the wall with a graphism, with a blow. In this way he marks out the territory. The mark is not lacking in substance: it is rarely a mere stroke, it is an imprint, a sign, letters, figures, formulas, symbols. The circle, the empty space bear Tpies figures, his writings, they are gripped and fixed in the space of the canvas. An ordered code that would give access to what is unsayable. A whole repertoire, a code that has run through his work for over sixty years. Tpies unites opposites, what is unnameable, matter and signs, in a flux, in the flux of his history. We should not neglect this captivating, magical, mystic aspect under the pretext of science, of order, of decency. In keeping with ancestral knowledge and the arguments of contemporary sociologists and anthropologists, Tpies is fully aware of the interplay between the sciences, the arts, policies and beliefs. Just as the first sampling of his museum-anthology presents him to us in the basement of the Fundaci, especially in the books displayed there, it is a matter of preserving this nexus between our bonds, our systems of representation and relationship with the world, whether they be language, mathematics, spiritual systems or our deepest fears. Art, or the artistic act, is therefore this shuttle in the loom, this space that weaves, unites, tenses the different cords that we are made up of. Towards magic When he describes a childrens game, Antoni Tpies suggests that we look at a chair, especially an old chair, and imagine all its possible lives.5 From the wood its made of, passing through the factory, the work that has gone into making it, the sale, the bodies and feelings it has supported. A chair is a chair, but its also a sign. Upside down,

5. Antoni Tpies, The game of knowing how to look, Cavall Fort, (Barcelona), n 82 (January 1967).

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right way up, a medium, a means of crossing the frontiers between here and there, outside of this time. Objects become objects of power, thanks to the matter theyre made of, their history. And their transformation, as if by magic, brings them into contact with mysterious powers. If we invert the object, the points of view, we invert our heads. Personatges (Personages), from 1946, one of Tpies first works, and numerous drawings of the time turn faces and objects around in a mystic or fearful experience. Tpies has often literally glued, cut, enclosed and displaced objects, has transformed them into works of art. Sometimes he has altered their status, giving them another name and another place. Because a chair, a paintbrush, an overcoat, can enter an exhibition hall and find their place there. A T-shirt could be mislaid there, but here it is found in a graffiti-game of cut-off plaster feet. Objects and matters become transformed, but they are also what they are. Their solidity, their atoms are important. The artist, with his work, with his study, will transform them into objects of power, aware of the insignificance and the greatness they have. In these writings, and thanks to the choice of the objects that surround him and inhabit him in everyday life, Antoni Tpies takes an interest in this genealogy of the object that contains a charge of energy transmitted by its artifex to matter itself. Art is an artifice, an artefact Antoni Tpies would say magic. The Fundaci invites you, then, to step through the mirror, or rather, to walk through the door.

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Georges Mlis Les Hallucinations du baron de Mnchausen 1911

Activities within the framework of the exhibition The Fundaci proposes to the visitors to this reopening exhibition various activities that will help them discover or rediscover some of the creative forms that have accompanied Antoni Tpies aesthetic and ethical development, from the cinema and music to writing. In this case, apart from the guided visits, we offer the films of Georges Mlis, one of the many cineastes whose work forms part of Tpies film library; the String Quartet No. 2, a six-hour-long composition by Morton Feldman, and the presentation of the first volume of Tpies complete writings, Memria personal. Fragment per a una autobiografia (Obra escrita completa. Volum I), which is being published in Catalan, Spanish and English. In addition, a conversation between Uwe Fleckner and Juan Jos Lahuerta (Primitive and contemporary: the artists collection) will serve to analyse Tpies role as an art collector.
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Projection of a selection of films by Georges Mlis From 5 March to 2 May, from 10.00 a.m. to 8.00 p.m. 35 mm and colour, transferred to DVD Duration: 1 h 48 min 16 s Un homme de tte (1898), B&W, sound, 1 min 05 s; Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902), B&W, sound, 12 min 47 s; Le Royaume des fes (1903), colour, sound, 16 min 30 s; Faust aux enfers (1903), B&W, sound, 6 min 38 s; LAuberge du bon repos (1903), B&W, sound, 4 min 59 s; Illusions funambulesques (1903), B&W, sound, 2 min 10 s; Le Chaudron infernal (1903), colour, sound, 1 min 43 s; Le Mlomane (1903), B&W, sound, 2 min 44 s; Le Tonnerre de Jupiter (1903), B&W, sound, 3 min 32 s; Le Puits fantastique (1903), B&W, sound, 3 min 37 s; Le Raid Paris-Monte-Carlo en automobile (1905), B&W, sound, 10 min 17 s; Les Hallucinations du baron de Mnchhausen (1911), B&W, sound, 10 min 30 s; la conqute du Ple (1911), B&W, sound, 30 min 20 s. Georges Mlis (Paris, 1861-1938), film director and prestidigitator. His skill as an illusionist led him to discover numerous cinemato24

graphic tricks that he used in many of his films. His work is based on fantasy, imagination and humour. When the magic effects became especially complex, Mlis even took on the role of principal actor. Among his films, special mention must be made of Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902), Le Royaume des fes (1903) and la conqute du Ple (1912).

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Presentation of the first volume of Antoni Tpies complete writings, A Personal Memoir. Fragments for an Autobiography (Complete Writings. Volume I), published in Catalan, Spanish and English Wednesday 10 March 2010, 7.00 p.m. The presentation will be attended by Josep Miquel Sobrer, the translator into English of Tpies complete writings, and Pere Gimferrer, the co-translator into Spanish of Memria personal. Fragment per a una autobiografia. This work brings together all of Antoni Tpies memoirs. The indispensable account of his experiences in Barcelona before, after, and especially during the Second Republic, the Civil War, the Franco regime in Madrid, Paris during the existentialist period and New York in the 1950s, is accompanied in this edition by historical pictures from various sources, some from the artists private family archive. Tpies personal relationships and artistic confluence with Picasso, Mir and Duchamp, among others; his exploration of modernity and the avant-garde, and the historic events of his life from his birth in 1923 to the mid-1970s, offer us a unique insight into the sources and development of his work. The volume includes a chronology and a selection of pictures that show the evolution of his artistic language from the 1940s to the present day. Josep Miquel Sobrer (Barcelona, 1944) is a writer, translator and emeritus professor of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the Indiana University of Bloomington. He has translated into English various stories by Pere Calders and Mirall trencat by Merc Rodoreda; and into Catalan, John Keats, H. G. Wells and Sylvia Plath, among others.

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Pere Gimferrer i Torrens (Barcelona, 1945) is a writer, translator and essayist. He came to attention as a Spanish-language poet in the 1960s, especially with Arde el mar (1966). With Els miralls (1970) he began publishing his poetic work in Catalan. In 1989 he published the collection El vendaval, which won the City of Barcelona Prize, the 1988 National Literature Prize and the 1989 Serra dOr Critics Prize. He has also stood out as a prose writer with Dietari (1979-1980) (1981), Dietari (1980-1982) (1982) and the novel Fortuny (1983, Ramon Llull Prize and Joan Crexells Prize).

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String Quartet No. 2 (1983) Work by Morton Feldman Saturday 13 March 2010, 6.00 to 12.00 p.m. Musical group: string quartet Ioana Petcu-Colan (violin), Cornelia Lrcher (violin), Jonathan Brown (viola), Erica Wise (cello) Duration: 6 hours (approx.) String Quartet No. 2 (1983) is a work of some six hours duration which is played in a single movement without interruptions. Morton Feldman (New York, 1926-1987), a US composer who was a pioneer of indeterminate music. Associated with experimental composers of the New York School such as John Cage, Christian Wolf and Earle Brown, his music is characterised by sonic innovations that generate asymmetrical musical structures of subtle rhythmic gradation and great length; isolated sounds, occasionally separated by silent pauses. His compositional experiments with chance inspired John Cage in pieces like Music of Changes. Feldman also associated with Abstract Expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Philip Guston, and with the poet, musician and art critic Frank OHara. In 1977 he composed the opera Neither, with a libretto by Samuel Beckett.

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Around Antoni Tpies. The Places of Art Primitive and contemporary. The artists collection, a conversation between Uwe Fleckner and Juan Jos Lahuerta Tuesday 13 April 2010, 7.00 p.m. Analysis of a fragment of Antoni Tpies collection of artworks within the framework of the dialogue between contemporary art and so-called primitive art present in the private and/or public collections of the 20th and 21st centuries, in the European and Catalan context. Uwe Fleckner is a professor of History of Art at the University of Hamburg and the Director of the Wareburh-Haus. The joint editor of the compilation of writings by Aby Warburg and Carl Einstein, he has also written numerous books and articles on the art of the 18th to 20th centuries, notably Die Historienmalerei (with Thomas W. Gaethgens, Reimer, 1996), The Treasure Chests of Mnemosyne: Selected Texts on Memory Theory from Plato to Derrida (Verlag der Kunst, 1999); his contribution to the series of essays The Dada Seminars (D.A.P./The National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2005) and Carl Einstein und sein Jahrhundert. Fragmente einer Intellektuellen Biographie (Akademie Verlag GmbH, 2006). In addition, Uwe Fleckner was the curator of the exhibition La invencin del siglo xx. Carl Einstein y las Vanguardias, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa, Madrid (2009). Juan Jos Lahuerta (Barcelona, 1954) is an architect and professor of History of Art and Architecture at the Barcelona School of Architecture. He is the author of various books on themes of contemporary art and architecture, such as 1927. La abstraccin necesaria (1989); Antoni Gaud. Arquitectura, ideologa y poltica (1993); Decir Anti es decir Pro. Escenas de la vanguardia en Espaa (1999); Le Corbusier. Espagne. Carnets (2001); Gaud. Antologa contempornea (2002); El fenmeno del xtasis (2004); Japonecedades (2005), and Destruccin de Barcelona (2005). He has curated exhibitions such as Dal. Arquitectura (Barcelona, 1996), Arte Moderno y revistas espaolas (Madrid, Bilbao, 1996, with E. Carmona); Universo Gaud (Barcelona, Madrid, 2002), and Pars-Barcelona (Paris, Barcelona, 2002). He is currently a member of the editing council of the magazine Casabella (Milan), the director of the publishing firm Mudito & Co and advising curator to the Barcelona Picasso Museum. In 2009 he received the International Essay Award of the Crculo de Bellas Artes for his book Estudios Antiguos.
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Antoni Tpies Tinta xinesa (Chinese Ink) 1945 Chinese ink on paper 28 x 23.5 cm Antoni Tpies Tinta (Ink) 1945 Chinese ink on paper 28 x 23.5 cm Antoni Tpies Tinta (Ink) 1945 Chinese ink on paper 28 x 23.5 cm

Antoni Tpies Figura sobre fusta cremada (Figure on Burnt Wood) 1947 Mixed media on wood 76.5 x 64.5 cm

Antoni Tpies Verns i dibuix (Varnish and Drawing) 1996 Paint, varnish, pencil and collage on canvas 261 x 195.5 cm

Antoni Tpies Quatre claus (Four Keys) 2003 Paint, collage and assemblage on canvas 161 x 161 cm

Antoni Tpies Formes en lespai (Forms in Space) 2009 Mixed media on canvas 300 x 250 cm

Antoni Tpies Cap vermell (Red Head) 2008 Paint on wood 38 x 46 cm

Antoni Tpies Cap i filferro (Head and Wire) 1999 Pencil and assemblage on canvas 81 x 100 cm

Antoni Tpies Al (Breath) 2008 Paint on canvas 46 x 55 cm

Antoni Tpies Esquelet sobre matria (Skeleton on Material) 2001 Mixed media on wood 130 x 97 cm

Antoni Tpies Espiral i escrits (Spiral and Writings) 2001 Mixed media on wood 150 x 150 cm

exhibition Project leaders: Laurence Rassel and Miquel Tpies Coordination: Sandra Fort, Nria Homs Assembly design: Sauerbruch Hutton, Berlin (Juan Lucas Young, with the collaboration of Amaia Snchez Velasco) Assembly: Tti, S.A. Acknowledgements Fundaci Antoni Tpies teamwork. Tana Andrade, Mario and Nieves Berenguer, Nathalie Berghege, Manuel J. Borja-Villel, Margarita Burbano, Isabel Cervera, Maria Chiba, Carlos Cruaas, Joachim De Nys, Lotte Maria Dinse, Nuria Enguita, Concha Esteban, Uwe Fleckner, Dolors Folch, Miquel Garcia, Gemma Garrigosa, Elvira Gaspar, Akiko Imoto, Juan Jos Lahuerta, Daniel Lelong, Magali Melandri, Gustau Molas, Constance of Monbrison, Manuel J. Moreno, Takeshi Motomiya, Manel Oll, Domnec Palau, Jlia Prez, Susana Pellicer, Pere Qulez, Artur Ramn, Jordi Ravents, Anna Ricart, Ariadna Robert, Joan Roma, Irene Sen, Arnau Soler, Loli Soriano, Jordi Umbert (and, especially, Antoni and Teresa Tpies) Images p. 7: Succession Marcel Duchamp / Vegap and adagp, Paris, 2010 p. 11: Henri Michaux, vegap, 2010 pp. 29-38: Fundaci Antoni Tpies / vegap, 2010 Text Fundaci Antoni Tpies, 2010 Published with a Creative Commons license Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/es/

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