About the Artist
Antoni Tapies
Antoni Tapies (1923 – 2012) was a Spanish painter, sculptor and art theorist, who became one of the most famous European artists of his generation, and was perhaps the best-known Spanish (Catalan) artist to emerge in the period since the Second World War. He first came into contact with contemporary art as a teenager through the magazine D’Aci i D’Alla, published in Barcelona, and during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), while he was still at school, he taught himself to draw and paint. On a French government scholarship in the early 1950s he lived in Paris, to which he often returned. He helped co-found the first Post-War Movement in Spain known as Dau al Set which was connected to the Surrealist and Dadaist Movements. In 1953 he began working in mixed media; this is considered his most original contribution to art. One of the first to create serious art in this way, he added clay and marble dust to his paint and used waste paper, string, and rags. His work shows a highly energetic expressiveness.
