CEJE members visit the Tàpies Foundation

Twenty CEJE members visited the Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona on Tuesday, March 26. Those attending this activity of the Círculo Empresarial Japón España took a guided tour where the figure of Tàpies and his relationship with Japan were explained, as well as the modernist building designed by the architect Montaner i Simón.

In addition, it was also possible to visit the exhibition “Tàpies. The trace of Zen”. This exhibition focuses on Antoni Tàpies’ interest in the work of some Japanese monks of the 18th and 19th centuries who were transmitters of the teachings of Zen Buddhism, and who developed a critical attitude and a will to disrupt the scale of conventional values -including those of artistic practice-, such as Hakuin, Sengai, Jiun, Tori, Rengetsu.

The exhibition shows how Tàpies integrated many of the attitudes, images and techniques used by these artists into his language and into the Western tradition that was his own. It is not a process of mimesis, but of assimilation of a way of working, and also of a vision of the world that the Japanese tradition has been able to preserve in temples and gardens, poems and calligraphies, ceramics and paintings.

CEJE members were also able to visit the exhibition inaugurated most recently as part of the Tàpies Year, “Chiharu Shiota. Everyone, a universe”. The Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (Osaka, 1972), heir to Ana Mendieta and a whole generation of feminist artists of the early 1970s, internationally known for the creation of enigmatic and contemplative installations made with wool, has been invited to intervene in the exhibition spaces of the Fundació with the aim of establishing a direct dialogue with the Tapian symbology and to create a game of correspondences and mirror effect that go beyond space and time.

At the end of the visit, CEJE members were able to share a more relaxed space with a cocktail at Passeig Escribà, a Japanese Peruvian restaurant and bar of Nikkei cuisine in Barcelona that signifies the union of Japanese and Peruvian gastronomic culture, based on the techniques of preparation and cuts, as well as the exchange of products between both cultures developed in Peru.

Among the list of attendees was the Consul General of Japan in Barcelona, Ms. Shikata.