Antoni Tapies, the Catalan painter who passed away yesterday at 88, was a pioneering artist whose work moved through several periods. Tapies began his career with collage-based abstract paintings on cardboard, an aesthetic that precipitated the aesthetic of the Italian Arte Povera movement. In 1953 he had his first exhibitions in the United States and saw the work of the Abstract Expressionists, whose gestural strokes and energetic colors were a contrast to Tapies’s own sense of contemplative solitude.
The artist moved towards Surrealism in the 1960s and ‘70s, creating appropriated-object sculptures that suggested the influence of Robert Rauschenberg. The works Tapies is best known for are his sprawling, abstract paintings that at times integrate everyday materials, such as his “Sock” (1971), which features a white men's sock stuck to a canvas.
Tapies’s graffiti-like paintings include gestures that sometimes curl into recognizable figures, letters, and numerals. The artist saw his imagery as reflecting the “writing on the wall” of humanity’s group subconscious — “The dramatic sufferings of adults and all the cruel fantasies of those of my own age, who seemed abandoned to their own impulses in the midst of so many catastrophes, appeared to inscribe themselves on the walls around me,” he told the French dealer and art critic Michel Tapié in 1969.
For a look at Tapies’s work throughout his career, click on the slide show.