The famous Spanish/Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012) would have been 100 years old on 13 December.
Since 1967, Galerie Lelong & Co. has had the honor of regularly exhibiting his work. However, the gallery had never before placed an exhibition under the sign of Eros, of the sexed and fragmented body, of the omnipresent sensuality in his work.
Tàpies, a highly cultured artist, was well acquainted with Georges Bataille’s last book, "Les Larmes d’Éros" (1961), the iconography of which fed his imagination. As a gift to Tàpies in the year of his centenary, the exhibition’s title echoes and slightly modifies Bataille’s beautiful one.
The exhibition presents a group of a dozen paintings from 1990 to 2010, the last decades during which Tàpies pursued the formal and material experimentation that had always been at the heart of his practice. Assembled on wood and canvas, they are made up of materials emblematic of the artist’s work: sand, varnish, paint, pencils, and illustrate the aesthetic culmination of his work.
