Antoni Tàpies

ANTONI TÀPIES PUIG (Barcelona, 1923–2012).
“Frègoli.”
Mixed media on paper.
Certificate of authenticity issued by the Tàpies Committee is included.
Signed and dated in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 36 x 26 cm.
This work is linked to the project of the same name that Antoni Tàpies created together with the poet and artist Joan Brossa in 1969, published by Sala Gaspar in Barcelona. The collaboration took as its starting point the figure of Leopoldo Frégoli, a famous Italian quick-change artist known for his extraordinary ability to portray different characters and transform his appearance.The figure of Frégoli offered Tàpies and Brossa a motif particularly attuned to their respective explorations: transformation, identity, and the ambiguity of the image. Brossa had begun exploring the character in his poems as early as 1965, and the 1969 project finally brought together his texts with the images created by Tàpies.
This work marks a particularly significant moment in Tàpies’ career. By the late 1960s, he had established his distinctive material language, but his painting was evolving toward a greater presence of signs, marks, graphic elements, and ambiguous forms—capable of suggesting different associations depending on the viewer’s perspective. The image thus ceases to be a closed representation and becomes a space open to interpretation. The work thus brings together two of Tàpies’s central concerns during this period: the expressive capacity of the material and the symbolic power of the sign, within a conception of painting in which the image is never completely fixed and remains open to interpretation.
Initially self-taught, Tàpies took up drawing and painting at a very young age, and during the 1940s he came into contact with the European avant-garde and contemporary thought. In 1948, he was one of the founders of the Dau al Set group. Throughout his career, he held exhibitions around the world, in prominent galleries and museums such as the Guggenheim in New York and the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. His awards include the Prince of Asturias Award, the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association, the National Culture Award, the Grand Prize for Painting in France, and others, and retrospective exhibitions have been dedicated to him in Tokyo, New York, Rome, Amsterdam, Madrid, Venice, Milan, Vienna, and Brussels. His works are represented in major national and international museums, such as the foundation that bears his name in Barcelona, the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Guggenheim museums in Berlin, Bilbao, and New York, the Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan, MoMA in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London.