MADRID,SPAIN.- Antoni Tąpies was given the doctor honoris causa by the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. The president of this university, Carlos Berzosa , greeted the artist and said he is A universal Catalonian that makes this university better than an hour before. The artist said the award was to independence and self-study.
Carlos Berzosa stated: I never imagined I would personally greet and hug Antoni Tapies, a great artist and person committed to liberty, democracy and truth.
Antoni Tąpies will turn 80 years old on December 13. The winner of the 1958 Carnegie Prize, Tąpies has had major shows at The Museum of Modern Art (NY), The Guggenheim Museum (1962, 1995), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Musee dArt Moderne (Paris), the new Jeu de Pomme (1994, Paris), the Hayward Gallery (London), the Louisiana Museum (Copenhagen), the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo), the Nationalgalerie (Berlin), and many others. Sir Roland Penroses Tąpies concludes by noting that "the ultimate purpose . . . [of Tąpies art] is transcendental" and that his "deepest hope is of the transformation of mankind" through his art, which unveils "a cosmogony in which nothing whatsoever is mean." As Tąpies has written himself, he seeks "to remind man of what in reality he is, to give him a theme for reflection, to shock him in order to rescue him from the madness of inauthenticity and to lead him to self-discovery." In a New York Times review of Tąpies 1995 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC, Alan Riding suggests that Tąpies works show an attempt to "reach ultimate reality through introspection . . . to achieve the ultimate mysterious unity that links the entire universe."
Acclaimed by Robert Motherwell as the greatest living European artist, Tąpies prints have always been recognized as a major part of his oeuvre, and were celebrated in a retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art in 1991 that circulated to a number of museums in the US, Central and South America from 1991 to 1993. In connection with their show, the Museum of Modern Arts published Tąpies in Print (a retrospective of his prints and illustrated books, showing about 100 works), probably the best introduction to his graphic works. In addition to our featured work, Llibertat/Liberty, a large, beautiful original color lithograph at a very special price, Spaightwood Galleries has over 100 additional works in our inventory, more of which will be appearing soon on our web site.
The bibliography on Tąpies is enormous and growing: five volumes of the catalogue raisonné of his paintings, three of his prints, and volumes on his posters and sculptures have been published; in addition to many studies of his works by critics, there are also many volumes published by various museums on the occasion of retrospectives of his works, including (in English) Tąpies in Print (published for a survey of Tąppies print oeuvre by the Museum of Modern Art) and one by the Guggenheim Museum (on his paintings).
