This exhibition will focus on Antoni Tàpies’ interest in the work of certain Japanese monks from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who helped spread the teachings of Zen Buddhism, and who developed a critical attitude and a willingness to upset conventional values – including those of artistic practice – such as Hakuin, Sengai, Jiun, Torei and Rengetsu. The exhibition will show how Tàpies integrated into his language, and into his own strand of the Western tradition, many of the attitudes, images and techniques that these artists used. It was never a process of mimesis, but rather the assimilation of a way of working, and also of a vision of the world that the Japanese tradition has preserved in temples and gardens, poems and calligraphy, ceramics and paintings.