Tapta meets Judd: Textile Sculpture and Minimalism at Brussels' Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts

At the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, the exhibition Tapta meets Judd places two sculptural practices in dialogue. Donald Judd's investigation of geometry, seriality and the presence of the object is set against the work of Tapta, the Belgian artist of Polish origin who transformed textile and later neoprene into flexible structures that redefine the relationship between work and environment. Born Maria Wierusz-Kowalski in 1926, Tapta left Poland after the Second World War and settled in Brussels, studying at the visual arts school La Cambre and graduating in textile art in 1949. From the 1960s she developed a three-dimensional conception of textile, producing sculptures and environmental installations; in the 1980s she introduced neoprene, exploring tension, flexibility and construction. The juxtaposition is presented as a way to move beyond traditional categories of sculpture: modular precision on one side, a tension between elasticity and rigour on the other, with material treated as an active element. The force of the pairing emerges above all from the distance between the two languages. Tapta's research, long less recognised, claims an autonomous position in debates on contemporary sculpture and opens new perspectives on how works inhabit and transform space. Tapta died in 1997.