Exhibitions
Anna Irina Russell enters the Tàpies game
'One, two, three.' recovers the playful imagination of Antoni Tàpies to explore the links between body, matter, breath and space.
Play occupies a central place in Anna Irina Russell's artistic practice, which she understands not as a minor activity or associated with frivolity, but as a methodological and relational framework capable of transforming the usual ways of perceiving and inhabiting space. In this sense, one, two, three. is based on the imagination of Antoni Tàpies and, specifically, on the sculpture proposal that the artist conceived for the Oval Room of the MNAC: a large, hollow and perforated sock, inside which the public could enter and turn it into an inhabited body.
Russell now takes up this playful imagination and activates its possibilities from a fully contemporary sensibility. His piece invites us to enter this great sock dreamed up by Tàpies and to physically experience a work that is not only contemplated from the outside, but is traversed, inhabited and transformed through the presence of the public. The body thus ceases to be a simple spectator to become an active agent of a situation in which work, matter and space establish a changing relationship.
This way of understanding participation connects with an idea of play that Antoni Tàpies already developed in The Game of Knowing How to Look , an essay published in 1967. For the artist, playing is not equivalent to acting arbitrarily, but constitutes a form of learning and expanding one's gaze and knowledge. Russell's work shares this same sensitivity: the playful becomes a tool for displacing conventional hierarchies between work and spectator and for generating other forms of relationship between people, objects and environment.
His artistic practice is mainly articulated through soft sculpture and installation, from where he investigates non-hegemonic communication processes. Air and breathing acquire a material and relational dimension. His inflatable structures breathe, expand and waver on the edge of collapse, focusing on what escapes language and overflows the image: overflow, contagion and asphyxiation. Matter, far from being passive, thus acquires its own expressive capacity and becomes the protagonist of a communication process.
One, two, three. proposes an experience in which play becomes a form of knowledge and the body, a tool for looking in a different way. The piece recovers Tàpies' intuition to take it towards a territory where the limits between living beings, objects and space become more permeable, and where the artistic experience is constructed through participation, breathing and movement.
The proposal will be presented on September 18, 2026, from 7 to 9 p.m., as part of the series Following the Sun. Uncovering the Gaze of the Tàpies Museum , curated by Carolina Ciuti.
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