Collectable

My paintings had turned into walls

MACBA’s Tàpies (6)

work

Antoni Tàpies, 1959, Pintura ocre

‘A whole new landscape, as in the story of one who goes through the looking glass, opened before me as if to communicate the most secret innerness of things. A whole new geography illumined me from surprise to surprise. A suggestion of rare combinations and molecular structures, of atomic phenomena, of the world of the galaxies, of microscopic images. The symbolism of dust – “to become one with dust, this is the deep identity, that is to say, the internal depth between man and nature” (Tao Te Ching) – and of ash, of the earth whence we come and to which we return, of the solidarity that is born on realising that the differences between us are no greater than those that exist between one grain of sand and another… And the most sensational surprise was to discover one day, suddenly, that my paintings, for the first time in history, had turned into walls.’ From the article ‘Comunicació sobre el mur’ (Communication on the wall), Essais magazine, 1969.