Zen Buddhism as Seen by Antoni Tàpies

Look at some of Antoni Tàpies' works from the late 1970s and many of the 1980s and you will see reflected the moment when the artist made a change in his career and began to take an interest in traces and writing as artistic elements. His contact with Japanese Zen Buddhism from the 18th and 19th centuries was very important, as you can see at the exhibition “Tàpies: L'empremta del Zen”, which can be visited at Fundació Antoni Tàpies from 13 December to 23 June.

In the late 1970s, the artist became interested in the works of Japanese monks who practised Zen Buddhism, including Hakuin, Sengai, Jiun, Tōrei and Rengetsu. They shared a vision of Zen Buddhism with a critical accent that made them alter the more conventional scale of values, both from a moral and artistic point of view.

Tàpies took the works of these authors of past centuries and fused them with the language and tradition of Western art, assimilating in his creations of that period the way of working and the motifs that these Zen monks used. These works show us different images and techniques, but they also speak to us of a way of seeing the world, different from our regular one, expressed by ceramics and paintings, in the structure of gardens, in poems and in calligraphy.

And it was precisely in those years that Tàpies began to replace the creations based on painting materials with a return to the brushstroke that recovered traces, signs, ideograms... in short, writings. As a result, the creations were moving towards drawing and abandoning the mural character.

What you will see in this exhibition is, in any case, a selection of the many works by Antoni Tàpies that show the weight of Japanese tradition in his work.

If you want to see the exhibition: “Tàpies: L'empremta del Zen”, come to the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, and do not forget to check the website for all the information on the subject.