Lot 529 D

'Unless I base it on very personal and specific circumstances, I do not understand the act of creation. I neither see the artist sub specie aeternitatis [under the aspect of eternity], treating a concept of beauty as a constant value, nor can I picture him as the slave of a program or of an ideology that does not correspond to circumstances, to actual facts. For as an independent and thinking being, he has a particular vocation to discover the facts. In my view, the artist is alive and changeable just like the reality, of which he is an expression, and such an expression is not rigid but a versatile notion that we create ourselves. An expression that is not purely receptive, not a reflex of a period, as some say, it rather plays its part in it, giving rise to the change of its own definition. To Paul Klee's grand statement that the artist were neither a servant nor a master of anything but solely the mouthpiece of nature, I would like to add: mouthpiece of the variable concept, which man forms from it. I do not say this because I follow Berkeley in my work but because I see that we incessantly enrich reality and that we need to readjust reality with every step we take.' (Antoni Tapies, Malerei im Wandel der Wirklichkeit, reprinted in: Antoni Tapies, Retrospektive, Bilder, Objekte und Zeichnungen, exhib.cat. Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, Berlin 1974, p.21).