Lot 835 D

Mixed media, collaged on card 70 x 100.5 cm, framed under glass. Signed 'Tàpies' lower right. - Traces of studio. The reverse partly mounted with glue on card support.

Agustí 4734

Provenance: Galerie Maeght Lelong, Paris: Galerie Ehrensperger, Zurich; Private Collection, Germany

“Unless I assume highly personal and specific circumstances, I cannot understand the act of creation. I do not see the artist as sub specie aeternitatis, handling a concept of beauty as an unchangeable value; nor can I imagine him as the slave of a programme or of an ideology that does not match circumstances or reality. After all, as an independent and thinking creature, it is precisely the artist who is called upon to discover the facts. For me the artist is as much alive and changeable as reality of which he is an expression, and such an expression is not rigid, but a flexible concept which we produce ourselves. In other words, the artist is an expression that is not purely receptive or, as many would say casually, the reflection of a time. Rather, he plays his role within time and, from case to case, causes his own concept to be modified. Paul Klee once stated very aptly that the artist is neither the servant nor the master of anything, but that he solely and entirely the mouthpiece of nature. I would like to add that he is the mouthpiece of a variable concept which man forms for himself of nature. I am not saying this because I want to follow Berkeley in my profession, but because I can see that we keep enriching reality and that we need to re-adjust reality with every step that we take.” (Antoni Tapies, Malerie im Wandel der Wirklichkeit, reprinted in: Antoni Tapies, Retrospektive, Bilder, Objkte und Zeichnungen, exhib.cat., Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, Berlin 1974, p.21)