The artist Àngel Jové, born in Lleida in 1940 and died in October 2023Jové is considered one of the great Catalan artists of the second half of the 20th and the 21st century. He was a multifaceted artist. He was part of the groups Cogul and El Maduixer. He was one of the leading Catalan conceptual artists. He participated in the first video art piece in Spain. First deathAnd, in his own way, he was one of the leading figures of Catalan pop art. He also collaborated on some of Bigas Luna's early films, designed lighting for the Zeleste theater, and created dozens of book covers for the Anagrama publishing house. Even so, he remained a cult artist.

The first and only collector of the pioneering exhibition that Antoni Tàpies held at the Galeries Laietanes in 1950 was Joan Antoni Samaranch, a family friend, as Tàpies himself recalled in one of his writings. It was difficult for Tàpies to put on that exhibition. Despite Josep Gudiol's insistence, his friend Joan Brossa advised him against showing his works in public. But Tàpies decided to do it before embarking on his first trip to Paris, funded by the Círculo Mallol. No photographs of the installation survive, but in those years the gallery was practically dark to highlight the exhibited works. In Tàpies' case, accounts described the atmosphere in the afternoon as "terrifying," explains Pablo Allepuz, curator of the Museu Tàpies collection and co-curator, with the director, Imma Prieto, of the institution's new exhibition. The perpetual motion of the wall"This coincidence between the space, the exhibition context, and the content of Tàpies's painting is an important aspect for understanding his critical reception—that is, everything that journalists and critics said about his work—and also for considering that perhaps even what Tàpies painted then and from then on was already present."

With the record number of plays on Spotify that it achieved LuxRosalía's latest albumIt's plausible to imagine that some of the people who attended Tuesday's presentation of Barcelona's cultural offerings at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid might have heard some of her new songs on their way to the event organized by Turisme de Barcelona. "The Palau de la Música Chamber Choir is featured on the album every day," asserted Joan Oller, general director of the Palau de la Música. "It was recorded at L'Auditori," added Víctor Medem, his counterpart at the Barcelona music venue. Valentí Oviedo, director of the Gran Teatre del Liceu, chimed in: "Rosalía hasn't sung at the Liceu, but I invite her to come and sing there whenever she wants. I'm not going to let the others down now," he joked.

For Antoni Tàpies, art was a path to knowledge and transformation. "I think a work of art should leave the viewer perplexed, make them reflect on the meaning of life," he stated. As for the audience, Tàpies also considered children, and in 1967 he published an article in the magazine Strong Horse titled The game of knowing how to lookWith this approach, he spurred them on to go further: starting with an everyday object, specifically a chair, he proposed that they consider the chair's entire life, from the tree where the wood came from to the carpenter who made it. And also its destruction, how an old chair could be used to fuel a bonfire. "Look, look closely! And let yourself be fully carried away by everything that what our gaze offers resonates within you, like someone going to a concert in a new dress with an open heart, eager to listen," Tàpies told them.

Àngel Jové (1940-2023) was a great and multifaceted artist: one of the authors of the first video art work in the State, First death, He collaborated with Bigas Luna on films such as Bilbao and Poodle and He designed objects such as the lamp BabelIn addition, he created dozens of covers for the publishers Lumen and, above all, Anagrama. Jové could have lived off his earnings, but he continued writing and creating tirelessly in his studio. His fans and those who are yet to discover him are in luck: two years after his death, the Tàpies Museum The museum will showcase his legacy in a major exhibition curated by the renowned art historian Maria Josep Balsach, a partner of the artist. It will be one of the highlights of the museum's 2026 program and one of the year's most important exhibitions in Barcelona. "Àngel Jové was a very powerful artist, but also very sensitive," says Imma Prieto, director of the Museu Tàpies. "He held a few very specific exhibitions, often out of friendship, but the art world didn't interest him; he found it disrupted his concentration. When he had to choose between the art world and creating, he chose to create."

To mark the centenary of Antoni Tàpies last year, the Museu Tàpies commissioned director Albert Serra to create a piece that would generate new narratives and reflections on the painter's work. The result is Faith without works is dead52 minutes of magnetic and deconstructed images, eight segments ranging from the study of a body or a scene framed in a sensual, almost violent way, to total visual abstraction, sometimes projecting a work by Tàpies and giving great prominence to the sound mosaic of loops The film features synthesizers by Marc Verdaguer, Serra's regular musician. It was screened this Thursday at the Museu Tàpies as part of the Loop Festival, a closing of the circle that culminated in a subsequent discussion between the filmmaker and journalist Joan Burdeus.

Antoni Tàpies is one of the artists who the French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman (Saint-Étienne, 1953) has included it in some of his exhibitions. In one of the most recent, In the stirred air...At the Centre for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, ​​the model of Cloud and chair that crowns the Museu Tàpies, a Face from the 1960s and White diptych with crackle effect, The latter is a painting to which Didi-Huberman gave a corporeal dimension. The trajectories of Tàpies and Didi-Huberman share many elements related to the body, the connection between art and politics, and the transformative power of art; it was therefore only a matter of time before their paths crossed: Didi-Huberman is the winner of the second edition of the International Essay Prize "Gesture of Yesterday, Thought of Today," promoted by the Museu Tàpies and the Tàpies Chair at Pompeu Fabra University.

The revolution proclaimed by the surrealists remained in their works. They often behaved like gentlemen from head to toe. Filmmaker Germaine Dulac (1882-1942) released the first surrealist film, The shell gives you clergyman, in 1928, a year before the iconic An Andalusian dog, by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. But instead of congratulations, he received insults and had to endure being told he was a "cow" by Louis Aragon and André Breton. And the author of the script, Antonin Artaud, complained that Dulac's work, whom the Tàpies Museum dedicated a pioneering exhibition until February 22, had distorted its text. In fact, before the film's premiere, the magazine Nouvelle Revue Françaisehad ignored her and had published that the film's director was Artaud. She wrote them a letter asking them to rectify her statement.

The enigmatic artist André du Colombier (Barcelona, ​​1952 - Paris, 2003) is remembered for the unusual actions he used to perform at bar tables: sitting on the other side of his audience, he would take all sorts of mundane objects out of a plastic bag and display them for a few minutes. Then, he would pack them away and leave. These objects were of all kinds, as can be seen starting this Wednesday at the Museu Tàpies in Du Colombier's first solo exhibition in a museum: there were toy-like padlocks, small bottles filled with colored sand, small imitation Chinese vases, and metallic-colored plastic plates. "one of the most enigmatic figures in the art of the second half of the 20th century," says the director of the Museu Tàpies, Imma Prieto. "We can say that he is a cursed artist, radical, in the etymological sense of the word, of going to the root of language itself and questioning its functionality," she adds.

Something as mundane as a conversation with his father marked a turning point in the career of artist Benvenuto Chavajay (San Pedro la Laguna, Guatemala, 1978). Chavajay asked him what art meant to him. After a long silence, his father replied that the concept didn't exist either in his language, Tzututil, or in his memory. Chavajay was surprised by this silence and has been delving into art for about twenty years, with works like the performance he will perform at the Museu Tàpies this Thursday.

"The evolution of contemporary art goes one way and that of my mind goes another, and I believe that the interest of this proposal lies in that collision," he said on Thursday. Albert Serra before presenting at the Filmoteca Faith without works is dead, a piece commissioned by the Museu Tàpies to commemorate the painter's centenary celebrated last year. tribute perhaps it would be excessive: for 53 minutes divided into eight parts with titles like Friend, Oracle either First fall, Serra films scenes without narrative or hardly any action, sometimes over the projection of a work by Tàpies and always accompanied by a sound envelope of layers of synthesizer and feedback by his regular musician, Marc Verdaguer. Occasionally, subtitles appear that have no relation to what is shown on the screen: it could be an evocative "Who dreams of whom?", a disconcerting "Amor Visca" or a cryptic "honey, oriole, sparrow, warbler". Among the actors who appear in the film – it cannot be said that they act – is Lluís Serrat, Serra's faithful squire since the times ofHonor of chivalry. The images have a magnetic and violent aftertaste, especially when the camera moves abruptly as if someone had hit it.

Palestinian artist Noor Abed (Jerusalem, 1988) is one of the people whose life was profoundly altered by the construction of the Israeli wall. Her career began in the field of performance, but those added restrictions forced her to rethink how she could express herself, and she found a new medium in video art. "I lived half my life in Jerusalem, I finished high school, but when they built the wall I had to move to Ramallah. Afterwards they didn't allow me to enter Jerusalem, and I think my body didn't understand," says Noor Abed on the occasion of the exhibition at Tàpies Museum from one of his latest works, the video At night we held between, the result of having won the video art production scholarship Han Nefkens Foundation Tàpies Museum in 2022, endowed with 15,000 euros.

Creators who leave and consolidate their careers abroad often have to pay the price of receiving little attention in Catalonia. After an early exhibition at the Metrònom gallery, the Senda gallery has been the thread that has maintained the connection between photographer Anna Malagrida (Barcelona, ​​1970), who has lived in Paris for nearly twenty-five years, and her hometown for years. Until this Thursday, the Museu Tàpies does her justice by dedicating the first exhibition in a Barcelona museum to her, entitled Anna Malagrida. Opacitas. Ensuring Transparency. "When Imma [Prieto, director of the Museu Tàpies] suggested this exhibition to me, I was very excited," says Anna Malagrida.

Creators who leave and consolidate their careers abroad often have to pay the price of receiving little attention in Catalonia. After an early exhibition at the Metrònom gallery, the Senda gallery has been the thread that has maintained the connection between photographer Anna Malagrida (Barcelona, ​​1970), who has lived in Paris for nearly twenty-five years, and her hometown for years. Until this Thursday, the Museu Tàpies does her justice by dedicating the first exhibition in a Barcelona museum to her, entitled Anna Malagrida. Opacitas. Ensuring Transparency. "When Imma [Prieto, director of the Museu Tàpies] suggested this exhibition to me, I was very excited," says Anna Malagrida.

Antoni Tàpies would have been delighted to welcome the Catalan-born Mexican artist Marta Palau (Albesa, 1934 - Mexico City, 2020) to his museum. She welcomed Tàpies into her studio during one of the artist's trips to Mexico, and the Tàpies Museum Palau presents her first major international posthumous retrospective from this Thursday until August 17. Both artists have in common the spiritual, magical and social character that they gave to art, as well as their interest in pre-Hispanic cultures and ancestral knowledge. In the field of art, Tàpies and Palau shared recurring interests, such as matter, the body and nature.