Chiharu Shiota, a 52-year-old Japanese woman, fits uncomfortably into an existing order. An exhibition of her at the Fundació Tàpies in Barcelona pays tribute to her work.

Shiota is one of those artists for whom affliction is a wellspring. She works in her owl cave, from where she directs her exploits against the arrogance of finite, unappealable forms. The range is very simple: achromatism and non-color (in Eastern culture, both white and black have a meaning opposite to ours) and warm red. For the Japanese pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, Shiota made the much-photographed The Key in the Hand. She intervened in two barges, Castellón Contemporary Art Space and Pristina, for the Manifesta for 2022, which wants to emulate dark matter made with black stones and stones extracted from the Balaguer quarry, in Lleida, Spain.