Antoni Tapies, Spain's greatest living artist, is a leading exponent of "matter" painting, a style characterized by encrusted layers of paint that create an effect of solid relief. His best-known works resemble sections of weathered wall, textured with the traces of time and human endeavor. This highly concrete, starkly immediate art reflects the artist's profound humanitarian concerns and continues the tradition of realism and solemn mysticism that has been characteristic of Spanish art through the centuries. Featuring high-quality reproductions of major works from all phases of the artist's career, this book traces the development of Tapies's art from the drawings of the 1940's, when he was forced by a potentially fatal disease to spend a long period in sanatoria, to the first "wall" paintings of the mid-1950's, from the assemblages of the 1970's to the fire-clay sculptures of recent years. A number of his latest paintings are discussed and illustrated. The author shows how the artist's intensely personal imagery is intimately related to his intellectual and political experiences. Throughout his career Tapies has been an advocate of freedom for his native Catalonia and, during the Franco dictatorship, was an outspoken champion of human liberty. Such concerns have caused the artist to avoid pure abstraction, whether by virtue of references to the visible world in his works or by the sheer force of their material presence. Tapies has drawn inspiration from a wide variety of sources: the art of Joan Miro and Paul Klee, of Surrealism and Far Eastern calligraphy have played as formative a role as have the music of Richard Wagner and the philosophy of Hegel, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the FarEast. He has absorbed these influences to fashion an art of confession, of manifestos and appeals, homages and protests. This overview of an oeuvre marked by the greatest personal and artistic integrity is completed by biographical notes and an extensive bibliography.
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Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German
Original Language: German
About the Author
Antoni Tàpies was born in Barcelona in 1923, and he continues to live and work there. He participated in the Venice Biennial in 1954 and 1958, and won an award for painting there in 1993; he also received the Guggenheim International Award in 1964, participated in Documenta 3, and in 1981 he was awarded the Medalla de Oro de Bellas Artes by King Juan Carlos I in Madrid. He has been the subject of numerous retrospectives at major museums worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
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