Tàpies. The Zen Imprint
By Charlotte Stace
The Fundació Antoni Tàpies welcomes a new exhibition on the work of Tàpies called The Zen Imprint.
This exhibition will focus on Tàpies’ interest in the work of a number of Japanese monks from the 18th and 19th centuries. These monks helped spread the teachings of Zen Buddhism and developed a critical attitude and a willingness to upset conventional values – including those of artistic practice.
The exhibition will show how Tàpies integrated into his language, and into his own strand of the Western tradition, many of the attitudes, images and techniques that these monks and artists used. It was never a process of mimesis, but rather the assimilation of a way of working, and also of a vision of the world that the Japanese tradition has preserved in temples and gardens, poems and calligraphy, ceramics and paintings.