Tapies

Antoni Tapies, Spain's greatest living artist, is a leading exponent of matter painting, a style characterized by encrusted layers of paint that create an effect of solid relief. His best-known works resemble sections of weathered wall, textured with the traces of time and human endeavor. This highly concrete, starkly immediate art reflects the artist's profound humanitarian concerns and continues the tradition of realism and solemn mysticism that has been characteristic of Spanish art through the centuries. Featuring high-quality reproductions of major works from all phases of the artist's career, this book traces the development of Tapies's art from the drawings of the 1940's, when he was forced by a potentially fatal disease to spend a long period in sanatoria, to the first wall paintings of the mid-1950's, from the assemblages of the 1970's to the fire-clay sculptures of recent years. A number of his latest paintings are discussed and illustrated. The author shows how the artist's intensely personal imagery is intimately related to his intellectual and political experiences.