French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman wins the Museu Tàpies essay prize

BarcelonaThe French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman (Saint-Étienne, 1953) is one of Europe's leading thinkers on the image. He is now set to incorporate the legacy of Antoni Tàpies into his body of work, having won the second edition of the International Essay Prize "Gesture of Yesterday, Thought of Today," an initiative of the Fundació Tàpies and the Tàpies Chair at Pompeu Fabra University. According to the prize's advisory committee, which unanimously awarded him the prize, "his research on the relationship between painting and the body, the transhistorical presence of symbols and archetypes, the visual memory of trauma, the materiality of the image, and gesture and political imagination has radically transformed the history of art." As he himself stated, he plans to delve deeper into the ideas of violence and the wall in Tàpies's work.

Georges Didi-Huberman:

"Today, politics and ethics are completely separated, and this is a catastrophe."

Didi-Huberman is a professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. His notable works includeImages in spite of everything: a visual history of the Holocaust(Paidós, 2004), When the images take position(Antonio Machado Books, 2008) andTo get through, no matter the cost(Shangrila, 2018), the result of a collaboration with the Greek poet Niki Giannari. Among her most important works are also The desire to disobey: what lifts us up (YO)andImagining a new beginning: what lifts us up (II), and The Factory of disjointed emotions(Les Éditions de Minuit, 2024).

In his role as an exhibition curator, Didi-Huberman is known for shows such asUprisingsat the Jeu de Paume in Paris (2016), which could be seen the following year at the National Art Museum of Catalonia under the titleInsurrections; Atlas, at the Reina Sofía Museum (2010), and "In the stirred air..." Image, emotion, utopia, which could be seen at the Reina Sofía Museum and the CCCB.