ANTONI TÀPIES
Barcelona,(Spain) 1923- Barcelona, (Spain) 2012
He began to practise drawing and painting in 1936, teaching himself. This interest was strenghtened in 1942-43, when he was convalescing from an illness. In 1944 he began studying law, but gave it up in order to devote himself to painting in 1946, initially producing work in a realist style with a strong Expressionist element. In 1948 he took part in founding the Dau al Set group. Up to 1950 his paintings were influenced by Surrealism and included people and objects in dreamlike spaces, representing visions of his inner world. He presented his first solo exhibition at the Galeries Laietanes (1950). That year he travelled to Paris with a grant and produced a large number of paintings with social subjects. In 1952 he was selected for the Biennale di Venezia and the Carnegie Institute, and in 1953 he travelled to New York in order to exhibit at the Martha Jackson Gallery, which also gave him an opportunity to become acquainted with Abstract Expressionism directly. That year he abandoned narrative figuration and defined a style characterised by the use of matter manipulated and ravaged, using ochre, black and red arranged in geometrical patterns on which he superimposed objects and signs that alluded to a recurrent iconography of beds, doors or limbs. During that period he showed his work at Biosca (Madrid, 1953), Laietanes (1954), the Bienal de São Paulo and the Biennale di Venezia. In 1955 he met Michel Tapié, who introduced him to the Galerie Stadler, where he presented his first solo exhibition in Paris (1956). In 1958 he had a special room at the Biennale di Venezia, where he was awarded the Carnegie Institute Prize, after which he began to achieve recognition in the United States. In the sixties he exhibited in Paris (Stadler, 1957; Maeght, 1967), the United States (Martha Jackson, 1957, 1959, 1961, 1967), Documenta 3 in Kassel (1964) and the ICA (1965). His first two retrospectives were held in 1962 (the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York). In 1970 he made a large number of object-sculptures, while in his works the focus shifted from matter to paint, which soaked the canvases, and vanishes began to appear. In the last three decades there have been many retrospectives, such as the one presented at the MEAC in 1980. In the eighties his paintings abandoned a rigid right-angled scheme and turned to more asymmetrical compositions, using curved forms and blotches of paint and returning to gesture and figurative suggestions, with varnishes acquiring great importance. He received the Prince of Asturias Prize in 1990, the year of the inauguration of the Fundació Tàpies, where he exhibited in 1998. He will die on 06/02/2012 in Barcelona.