Antoni Tàpies
b. 1923, Spain
d. 2012
Catalan painter, 1923-2012
Born in Barcelona in 1923, Antoni Tàpies Puig grew up in Barcelona. One of the founding members of Spanish Surrealism, he became friends with Joan Miró, and came to prominence in the late 1940s with richly symbolic paintings influenced by French Surrealism. Yet he abandoned this style in the mid-1950s for what would become his own distinct visual language: scratched, marked and gouged surfaces suggestive of ancient doorways and street graffiti. The dramatic sufferings of the post-war period ‘appeared to inscribe themselves on the walls around me,’ he told the French art critic Michel Tapié in 1969. In 1962 he was given his first solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and was represented by the Martha Jackson gallery in New York, an intellectual peer to the Abstract Expressionists. His work prefigured the arte povera movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and in 1990 the Tàpies Foundation opened a museum and library dedicated to his works in Barcelona.