Antoni Tàpies and Joan Brossa

ANTONI TÀPIES PUIG (Barcelona, 1923 - 2012) and JOAN BROSSA CUERVO (Barcelona, 1919 - 1998).
"Fregoli", 1969.
Lithographs by Tàpies and poems by Brossa. Copy A.G.
Copy justified by hand and signed by both authors.
Edited by Sala Gaspar.
Measurements: 37 x 28 x 2,5 cm (book).
Antoni Tàpies begins in the art during the long convalescence of a pulmonary disease. Progressively he will dedicate himself with greater intensity to drawing and painting, and finally he leaves his studies of Law to dedicate himself completely to art. Co-founder of "Dau al Set" in 1948, he began to exhibit in the Salones de Octubre in Barcelona, as well as in the Salón de los Once held in Madrid in 1949. After his first individual exhibition in the Layetanas Galleries, he travels to Paris in 1950, with a scholarship from the French Institute. In these years he began his participation in the Venice Biennial, exhibited again at the Layetanas and, after a show in Chicago, in 1953 he had a solo exhibition at Martha Jackson's gallery in New York. From then on, his exhibitions, both group and solo, were held all over the world, in leading galleries and museums such as the Guggenheim in New York and the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. He has won awards such as the Prince of Asturias, the Praemium Imperiale of the Japan Art Association, the National Prize of Culture, the Grand Prize for Painting in France, etc., and anthologies have been dedicated to him in Tokyo (1976), New York (1977 and 2005), Rome (1980), Amsterdam (1980), Madrid (1980), Venice (1982), Milan (1985), Vienna (1986) and Brussels (1986). He is represented in major museums around the world, such as the foundation that bears his name in Barcelona, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Guggenheim in Berlin, Bilbao and New York, the Fukoka Art Museum in Japan, the MOMA in New York and the Tate Gallery in London.
Brossa was a poet for whom there were no genre distinctions (literary, scenic, visual, objectual...), who began writing during the Civil War. He was co-founder of "Dau al Set" together with Ponç, Tàpies, Ciuxart and Tharrats, and throughout his career he received the Lletra d'Or, City of Barcelona, the UNESCO Picasso Medal, the National Plastic Arts Award, the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts and the National Theater Award from the Generalitat. In all of his work is present the concept of art as visuality, as spectacle. His visual poetry and his posters constitute the best known part of his work, to the point that in this field Brossa became a world reference. From the seventies onwards he manipulated objects to deepen their meaning, or to represent the bare concept, through everyday objects and poems. All of Brossa's poetry is full of references to visuality, and perhaps that is why he also entered the world of plastic art. From his beginnings, in 1941, Brossa created visual poems of a calligrammatic type. His first object, "Escorça", a true "objet trouvé", dates from 1943. And 1951 is the first object made expressly, from the association of two distant realities (in this case a hammer and a letter composed of two others). But it is from 1959 that the poet intensifies his visual research with the "Suites de poésie visuelle" (Suites of visual poetry). In these fragile compositions will already be the germ of many of the future visual poems. During the sixties and, more specifically, during the seventies, the best known Brossian visual poems and objects were conceived and later published. Their subject matter will be the same as that of the poems: socio-political denunciation, reflection on the meaning of words and things, surprising games, etc. But the material will no longer be only words, but letters and other elements loved by Brossa such as Fregoli, carnival, sleight of hand, etc. It will be from the exhibition at the Fundació Miró in Barcelona in 1986, "Joan Brossa o les paraules són les cosas" (Joan Brossa or words are things).