Empremta 2025

The imprint is both mark and void, presence and absence, something similar to the representation of black-and-white harmonies contained in the bars of notes and silences of a musical score.

Empremta 2025, the installation that occupies the entire floor surface of the room, does not result from a real impression but is a non-realistic representation of a tyre’s footprint. The car tyre became the exclusive theme of Peter Stämpfli’s work starting in 1969. He painted a series of large-format works representing the upper third of a large tyre measuring 6 m wide by 1.70 m high, with the stretcher cut following the curved profile of the tyre.

From the following year, 1970, the artist presented works focused on one part of the tyre, studying the geometric drawing of the tread extracted from catalogues of tyre manufacturers. The names of the real tyres on which they were based served as titles for the works, and some can be seen in Room B of this art centre.

The tyre imprint appeared for the first time in 1970 on the floor of the Galerie Rive Droite in Paris (image 1) and, in the following years, at the 7th Paris Biennale, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (image 2) or at the Musée Galliera in Paris, faithfully simulating a wide and long path across the floor or the wall.

Between 1985 and 1990, Stämpfli created two versions of a monumental imprint measuring 3 m in width and 30 m in length. One of the two versions, owned by the French State, will be installed in 2026 in the large 3,500-hectare sculpture park that will open in Paris, on the Île Séguin, in a new artistic area called Punta de les Arts.