Chiharu Shiota, the epic of spinning

Cave. The basement of the Fundació Tàpies in Barcelona has become the lair of an anti-heroine, in contrast to those luminous spaces of unbreakable heroes, like Tàpies. Chiharu Shiota, a 52-year-old Japanese woman, fits uncomfortably into an existing order. Above remains the Catalan painter and sculptor, who this year will be evoked again and again to pay tribute to him. In the underground, the Japanese artist has built a grotto with the ribald poetic effect of spinning. They function, however, as beams of light that guard beautiful fragments of the body: glass heads attached to other organs with colored wire; arms that perhaps were wings dragged by the gravity of a fall—did they fly too close to the sun?—and feet that support a womb made of red leather, where the living weight of a creature can almost be felt.

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. Theirs are made with materials that evoke the delicacy of the female body and that point to that Freudian

that ensures that no patient/artist wants to be cured. Her poetry is full of proud melancholies—Dickinson, Barrett Browning, Plath—who die slowly and exceptionally well. In the visual arts, Hesse, Mendieta, Bourgeois, Kusama (we must start calling them by their last names) faced a traumatic past and illness, with bastard materials that put their identity to the test: partial objects, cavernous structures, lairs of plaster, latex, red paint (blood), bulbs and mirrors. Wounds like jaws. But Shiota's

are not Kafka's rabbit hole; nor is it a labyrinth, nor is she an Ariadne. The only reality is that the minotaur is higher up, on the terrace of the foundation, glorified in his sculpture

The chair. In the iniquitous spaces of art, Shiota's work produces affection (cultural justice?). Now, in Tàpies, there is an effort to connect it with that of the Catalan artist. At least this is what the curator of the exhibition and director of the foundation, Imma Prieto, announces, who defends that "in both trajectories the dichotomy of life/death, Eros/Thánatos, appears." What artist doesn't work with these archetypes? Those responsible for museums should relax a little, relax the institutional framework, and more so in a foundation that since its inauguration, in 1990, has been a platform for artists so little suspected of belonging to the Tàpies universe such as Pedro G. Romero, John Akomfrah, Albert Serra, Allan Sekula and Hannah Collins, to name just a few. On the other hand, Shiota shares affiliation with Bourgeois and Mendieta, who were part of the Tàpies programming with retrospectives in 1991 and 1997.

What best identifies this artist, who has lived in Berlin since 2002, are the

made with wool, a material that is as inexpressive as it is extraordinary for transmitting speed and volumes. 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

, with 50,000 keys brought from all over the world hanging from a tangle of red threads on two barges. That same year, she intervened in the walls of the Castellón Contemporary Art Space with a dense tangle of filaments from which letters of gratitude hung; In the great hammam of Pristina, for the 2022 Manifesta, she repeated the formula with threads that allowed one to read dozens of personal stories handwritten by Kosovar victims and relatives. And at the Fundació Sorigué, in Lleida, she created the permanent pavilion titled

(2016), which wants to emulate dark matter made with black fibers and stones (planets, stars) extracted from the Balaguer quarry.

His work is reminiscent of 'kintsugi', an ancient Japanese art that teaches us to love our own scars.

The Red. The work that gives title to the Barcelona exhibition,

begins on the stairs leading to the underground gallery, where the visitor is wrapped in a tangle of red threads that connect 30 chairs purchased at flea markets. Many are broken or missing some element. It represents the blood capillaries, neuronal connections and constellations that unite us. In the next room, sculptures carefully placed within fishbowl-like structures convey a vivid impression of the experience of the vulnerable body: crystal heads and organs wrapped in silk mesh, beautifully invaded by malignant cells. In front of them, a disturbing uterus-shaped reticular sac.

In the most literal sense, the chair is the only element that connects the work of Tàpies and Shiota. A coincidence is that the two artists were young patients: “They removed my body, cut it into pieces and then put it back together. After recovering, I made molds of those parts,” explains Shiota about what inspires her work, after having been treated for ovarian cancer. Seen as a recovery technique, her work is reminiscent of

, an ancient art that teaches one to love one's own scars and is applied to broken ceramic pieces that are put back together with resins and metals. Shiota does not come out of this exhibition as a great artist, but she has the merit of making us look from the inside instead of from the outside, which is how we almost always look at the most celebrated art, any

'Each one, a universe'.

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