Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona 1923-2012

Espai Cavallers Gallery

He began his artistic experiments during the long convalescence of a serious illness. The growing dedication to drawing and painting pushed him to abandon his university studies. In the 1940s he exhibited his works, with a marked personality, which made him stand out in the artistic panorama of the moment. He is co-founder of the magazine Dau al Set (1948). Influenced by Miró and Klee, he then increases the iconographic factor and the magical theme. Little by little he incorporates geometrizing elements and color studies that lead to an interest in the subject, which results in fabrics with intense texture and great expressive and communicative possibilities.

With these Tàpies works, around the mid-1950s, international recognition arrived. From the sixties he incorporates new iconographic elements (writing signs, anthropomorphic elements, footsteps and signs that allude to the reality of Catalonia) and technical procedures (new surfaces, use of everyday objects and varnish). Tàpies’ pictorial language has evolved since then and has resulted in a diversified and productive plastic creation admired around the world.

He has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Kunsthaus of Zurich, at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, at the Jeu de Paume and at the Center Pompidou in Paris, at the Museo Nacional Center d’Art Reina Sofia in Madrid, at the Valencian Institute of Modern Art in Valencia and at the Contemporary Art Museum of Barcelona, among many others.

Parallel to his artistic activity, Antoni Tàpies has developed a work as a writer that has given rise to several publications: La practica de l’art (The practice of art, 1970), L’art contra l’estética (Art against aesthetics, 1974), Personal memoir (Personal memoir, 1977), Reality as art (Reality as art, 1982), For a modern and progressive art (For a modern and progressive art, 1985), Valor de l’art (Valor de l’art, 1993) and Art and its places (Art and its places, 1999).

Antoni Tàpies created the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in 1984 with the aim of promoting the study and knowledge of contemporary art, paying particular attention to the analysis of its role in the formation of the consciousness of modern man.

For more information about the artist Antoni Tàpies at Espai Cavallers Gallery