| Antoni Tapies was born in Barcelona in 1923. As a child his health was poor ; he began to draw and paint when still very young. He studied law and commerce at Barcelona University and took drawing lessons at the Valls Academy. The atrocities he witnessed as a youth during the Spanish Civil War were to leave their mark on him for the years to come. In 1946, he made his first abstract works, paint with collage and newspaper, pieces of string etc. In 1948, Tapiès founded the Dau al Set (seventh face of wheat in Catalan) movement in reaction against the prevalent intellectual apathy in Spain. As a result of meeting Miro, he entered a surrealist period ; the same year he showed at the Barcelona Salon dAutomne. In 1950, Tapiès held his first one-man show at the Laietanes Galleries in Barcelona. The following year, Tapiès met Braque and Picasso in Paris, and discovered informal art in the works of Dubuffet and Fautrier, as well as the writings of Michel Tapié. In 1952, Tapiès took part in the Venice Biennale and in 1953 his work was shown in the Martha Jackson Gallery in New-York.
Several exhibitions and awards attested that he had attained recognition. In 1954 Tapiès start mixing earth, sand and latex foam to his paint, in order to impart more relief and a coarser texture to his pictures ; the works done at this time, including the prints, bears the marks of his work, and in the early seventies, Tapiès start sculpture and assemblage, as well as continuing his large output of print (etchings, aquatints and lithographs, as well as illustrated books). In 1975, The Paris Musée dArt Moderne held a retrospective Tapiès exhibition. In 1981, Tapiès made his first ceramic pieces. In 1984, the Antoni Tapiès Fondation was created in Barcelona ; in 1988, a comprehensive show of his work toured the U.S.
Antoni Tàpies was born December 13, 1923, in Barcelona. His adolescence was disrupted by the Spanish Civil War and a serious illness that lasted two years. Tàpies began to study law in Barcelona in 1944 but decided instead within two years to devote himself exclusively to art. He was essentially self-taught as a painter; the few art classes he attended left little impression on him. Shortly after deciding to become an artist, he began attending clandestine meetings of the Blaus, an iconoclastic group of Catalan artists and writers who produced the review Dau al Set.
Tàpiess early work was influenced by the art of Max Ernst, Paul Klee, and Joan Miró, and by Eastern philosophy. His art was exhibited for the first time in the controversial Salo dOctubre in Barcelona in 1948. He soon began to develop a recognizable personal style related to matière painting, or Art Informel [more], a movement that focused on the materials of art-making. The approach resulted in textural richness, but its more important aim was the exploration of the transformative qualities of matter. Tàpies freely adopted bits of detritus, earth, and stonemediums that evoke solidity and massin his large-scale works.
In 1950, his first solo show was held at the Galeries Laietanes, Barcelona, and he was included in the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. That same year, the French government awarded Tàpies a scholarship that enabled him to spend a year in Paris. His first solo show in New York was presented in 1953 at the gallery of Martha Jackson, who arranged for his work to be shown the following year in various parts of the United States. During the 1950s and 1960s, Tàpies exhibited in major museums and galleries throughout the United States, Europe, Japan, and South America. In 1966, he began his collection of writings, La practica de lart. In 1969, he and the poet Joan Brossa published their book, Frègoli; a second collaborative effort, Nocturn Matinal, appeared the following year. Tàpies received the Rubens Prize of Siegen, Germany, in 1972.
Retrospective exhibitions were presented at the Musée National dArt Moderne, Paris, in 1973 and at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, in 1977. The following year, he published his prize-winning autobiography, Memòria personal. In the early 1980s, he continued diversifying his mediums, producing his first ceramic sculptures and designing sets for Jacques Dupins play LEboulement. By 1992, three volumes of the catalogue raisonné of Tàpiess work had been published. The following year, he and Cristina Iglesias represented Spain at the Venice Biennale, where his installation was awarded the Leone dOro. A retrospective exhibition was presented at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, and the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York, in 199495. Tàpies lives in Barcelona. |
