Against the Wall: With Lucía C. Pino and Prats Nogueras Blanchard

The Against the Wall series of encounters is part of the exhibition project Antoni Tàpies: The Perpetual Movement of the Wall, extending its question marks to the present. Setting out from an analysis of the contexts and forms of exhibition of Tàpies’ work in the 1950s, the programme sets out to activate the wall not just as a formal or architectural feature, but also as a sensitive, cultural and political device that structures the relationship between artwork, body and space.

The series —moderated by arts journalist Clàudia Rius— offers a series of contemporary dialogues between artists and agents in the art system working today with related concerns: matter and its symbolic baggage, the relation between art and architecture, the presence of the body, the affective dimension of the exhibition space and the ability of the wall to work as frontier, medium, skin and place for resistance. Far from a closed historiographic reading, the encounters activate Tàpies’ work as a resonant field through which to think about current practices to produce, exhibit and mediate art.

Each encounter deals with the wall from a specific point of view —material fragility, the skin of the artwork, the body and affect— but all of them share the intention of questioning the limits between object and venue, between intimacy and the public sphere, between institutionalisation and sensitive experience. In this respect, the series sees the wall as a place of friction and shared imagination, able to condense conflicts, desires and ways of relating that run through both Tàpies’ work and contemporary artistic practices.