Antoni Tàpies citations (39 citations, Page 2)

Antoni Tàpies: 39 citations0 J'aime

Antoni Tàpies: Citations en anglais

“The material presence of the work only serves as a conveyer launching an invitation to the observer to take part of the comprehensive game of the thousand and one emotions and visions.”

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Antoni Tàpies

Source: undated quotes, Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 – 2003,' (2004), p. 26.

“Despite my fervour for many Surrealist painters, I was soon wary of the preeminence of those 'literary anecdotes' that made many works appear as 'genre clichés', not unlike nineteenth-century pastiches. They often ignored the visual possibilities of the painting medium.”

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Antoni Tàpies

as quoted in 'Tàpies: From Within', June/November 2013 - Presse Release text, Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC), p. 9
1971 - 1980, Memòria Personal', 1977

“An image means nothing. It is just a door, leading to the next door. It will never happens that we will find the truth we are looking for just in an image; it will happen behind the last door that the spectator discover the truth, because of his own efforts.”

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Antoni Tàpies

Source: undated quotes, Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 – 2003,' (2004), p. 30.

“I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.”

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Antoni Tàpies

Source: undated quotes, Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 – 2003,' (2004), p. 25.

“All the walls of a city, which, by family tradition, seemed so mine, witnessed the martyrdom and the inhumane repression inflicted on our people. Cultural memories stressed its urgency. All the archaeological information I have absorbed, the advice of Leonardo da Vinci, the destruction brought about by Dada, the photographs of Brassaï, all contributed, unsurprisingly, to the fact that my first works of 1945 had something to do with street graffiti and a universe of repressed protest, clandestine yet full of life, as one could find on the walls of my country.”

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Antoni Tàpies

Tàpies is referring to the Franco-repression in Spain.
1945 - 1970, A Report on the Wall' 1970

“My illusion is to have something to transmit. If I can't change the world, at least I want to change the way people look at it.”

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Antoni Tàpies

a quote from Tàpies' talk, when his museum opened in 1990; as quoted in 'Antoni Tàpies a Painter With Textures, Dies at 88', by William Grimes, in 'The New York Times', 8 Febr, 2012, p. B17
1981 - 1990

“It would take me very far back to tell the story of how I developed my consciousness of the evocative power of mural imagery. These are memories of my adolescence and early youth when I lived enclosed within four walls during the time of war. The suffering of the adults and all the cruel imaginings of my age, abandoned to its own impulses amid all the surrounding catastrophes, were drawn and etched all around me.”

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Antoni Tàpies

1945 - 1970, A Report on the Wall' 1970

“My drawings [c. 1945 - 1955] were almost always figures, many pseudo-self-portraits, which I often set against a kind of sun or focus, as if the whole universe radiated from my head, from a point between my eyes. My few oils make even clearer this vision of an axial character, centrally placed, facing the spectator, or turned around, with symmetrical postures, as one in prayer; they show the influence of [medieval] Catalan Romanesque art. In general, molecular rays from the periphery appear to form the central figure and converge in his head, or come out of it, and give life to his surroundings.”

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Antoni Tàpies

as quoted in 'Tàpies: From Within', June/November 2013 - Presse Release text, Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC), p. 9
1971 - 1980, Memòria Personal', 1977

“In the potential of absurdity, hiding in the disparate combination of the various different subjects which in themselves are nothing but daily items equally in the exclusive representation of a normal item taken out of their usual context, is by far the most radical – in its effect comparable to a Japanese Zen koan - paradox to be witnessed, which modern art has produced, one of the most forceful impulses that generated from it.”

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Antoni Tàpies

Source: undated quotes, Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 – 2003,' (2004), p. 28.