Christie’s announces that it will sell works from the personal collection of Spanish artist Antoni Tàpies over the next year. A Giacometti work, Homme (Apollon) estimated at £800k-1.2m, will be featured in the up close sale of small scale works on October 3rd and a Rothko from 1969, Untitled (Orange and Yellow) estimated at £4-6m.
Tàpies first came to prominence in the late 1940s, working in a Surrealist idiom that shared much with the ideas of artists such as Paul Klee and his fellow Catalonian Joan Miró. A scholarship to Paris in 1950-51 led to a meeting with Pablo Picasso. Informed by his interest in Zen philosophy as much as by the privation of Post-War Spain, Tàpies deliberately chose commonplace materials to infuse with new significance, invoking a transformative alchemy that prefigured the Italian movement of Arte Povera. Following his first American exhibitions in 1953, he represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 1958; a celebrated solo show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum followed in 1962, and another toured Europe in 1973-74. In 1984, he created the Tàpies Foundation, which holds his archives and over 2000 of his works, and continues to this day to promote the interdisciplinary study of modern and contemporary art. Major retrospectives were held at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1994, at the Guggenheim in 1995, and at Madrid’s Reina Sofía Museum in 2000.
Masterworks from the Collection of Antoni Tàpies will be on view at Christie’s King Street from 29 September 2017 with highlights touring to Christie’s Rockefeller Center, New York (12 September), Hong Kong (18 to 21 September) and Madrid (19 to 20 September).
