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Viewing Antoni Tàpies

Born in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, Antoni Tàpies gained celebrity in the late 1940s for his richly symbolic paintings influenced by French symbolism. But he abandoned this style in the mid-1950s to forge his own visual language of abstraction, underpinned by the reoccurring use of windows, crosses and triangles, as well as unorthodox art materials such as dust, clay and string.

In celebration of the late artist’s 100th birthday, Timothy Taylor presents a solo exhibition of Tàpies’s paintings, object-based assemblages and works on paper, dating from 1989 to 2008, that explore spiritual decay and rebirth. Highlights include Matriu (1991), in which a cross symbol submerges a white canvas in graffiti spray-like black paint, and Ona-Mar (2006), an etched silkscreen which resembles a newspaper scribbled with codes, suggesting a world of hidden protest – repressed, clandestine, but full of life.

Shown together, they reveal an artist grappling with the emptiness unleashed by the post-war period in Europe. Tackling social, political and spiritual issues that resonate today, it’s little wonder his work continues to influence contemporary artists engaging with life, death and the complex of events of history. Make haste.

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Dates
19 January 2023 — 04 March 2023

Viewing SENSE: Beuys/ Gormley — A Conversation through drawing

Now’s your chance to see drawings by the prominent post-war artist Joseph Beuys alongside those by Antony Gormley. Curated by Gormley and installed across the Ropac’s Chapel Gallery in London, SENSE explores the artists’ shared ground — namely a joint interest in reconceptualising human relations with the natural world, social networks and the built environment.

For Beuys, the physical process of drawing was an essential means through which to crystalise his thoughts. In turn, Gormley describes ‘the act of drawing as a form of tuning.’ For him, as for Beuys, it is conceived as ‘a necessary daily activity in which thought is made physical and grounded.’ As you meander around the gallery, stop before three of Beuys’s four Movement Rhythm works from 1962. These three drawings are allied with two by Gormley, Set III and Search III, that ‘acknowledge the grid as the trellis of modernity and the body as a zone of becoming.’

It’s a rare opportunity to see the fundamental role of drawing to both artists’ practices, as well as their shared influences and distinctive vision. Run don’t walk.

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Dates
19 January 2023 — 22 March 2023

Viewing Dan Flavin: colored fluorescent light

Landing at David Zwirner this month is the gallery’s first presentation of Dan Flavin’s work in London. Born in New York in 1933, the American artist made his name creating illuminated light installations (or ‘situations’ as he preferred to call them) that offer a rigorous formal and conceptual investigation of space and light.

A pioneer of Minimalism, Flavin embraced the temporary nature of his work, often replacing parts which had shattered or blown as necessary. He enjoyed his first solo gallery show in 1961 and his first major museum exhibition in 1969. In 2004 a major retrospective of his work opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

Presented across two floors, this show recreates the artist’s momentous coloured fluorescent light exhibitions, which took place at Leo Castelli Gallery and Galerie Heiner Friedrich in New York and Cologne in 1976. Expect works that range in scale and colour from individual wall-mounted and T-shaped compositions to large-scale works which prompt the viewer to alter their course in the gallery. You’ll also see each of the nine colours that comprised his visual vocabulary during these years.

Shown together, they reveal the artist’s innovative use of immersive colour and serial progressions in response to architectural space. Get thee to Grafton street fast.

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Dates
12 January 2023 — 18 February 2023
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