(Barcelona 1923–2012)
Untitled, 1970, signed on the reverse, acrylic, pencil, metal and collage on fabric applied on wood, 109.5 x 110.3 x 7 cm

This work is registered in the Comissiò Tàpies, Barcelona, under no. T-9819 and it is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity signed by Antoni Tàpies Barba

Provenance:
Martha Jackson Gallery, New York (faded traces of the label
on the reverse)
Private Collection, USA

Like a researcher in his laboratory, I am the first spectator of the suggestions drawn
from the materials. I unleash their expressive possibilities, even if I do not have a very clear idea of what I am going to do. As I go along with my work I formulate my thought, and from this struggle between what I want and the reality of the material - from this tension - is born an equilibrium.
Antoni Tàpies

Texture and material are at the heart of the creative process of Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies. Influenced by the works of Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Paul Klee, the former law student turned entirely to painting in the mid-1940s. In 1948, he was one of the founding members of the artists’ group Dau al Set (Catalan for “Seven-Sided Die”), whose aim was to develop a painterly abstraction that was fed by the unconscious, by imagination and magic.

Tàpies’ special affinity for everyday materials and worn objects is evident even in his more ciphered or illusionist early work, influenced by Dada and Surrealism, which he subsequently dismissed as having robbed him of his spontaneity. The method of assemblage-like inclusion of various materials is more explicitly and less codedly found in the “object-paintings”, starting in the mid-1950s. These are testimonies of his interest in the factual and the concrete: as is the case with the wall-like commission — where precisely a wall is at stake (in Catalan: tàpia). The commission, in which elements extrinsic to the image give the work an evocative power through reminiscences of the past, of the neglected, of things not necessarily meriting pictorial representation, encompasses both provocation and stimulation. Pictoriality functions on two levels — the level of material language and that of drawing.

Tàpies thereby refuses to subscribe to abstraction. Rather, he sees his visual language as a way of entering a world, as a reflection of an evocative way of seeing with a great wealth of connotations, references, ideas and sensations. In that this pictorial world is not fixated on illusion, but is almost without exception anchored in the material, it remains concrete.
Tàpies’ art rejects the distinction between image and image carrier; the image becomes an object, the means of expression a medium in itself. The focus is on the surface structure as the actual pictorial event. For this purpose the artist uses new substances and techniques: sand, marble dust, earth, glue and plaster are added to the paint to give it plasticity for cuts, imprints, nicks and scrapes. In response to the oversaturation of colour by urban structures and advertising, Tàpies reduces his colour palette to shades of grey and beige.

The formal language is brought down to signs charged with meaning: he understands the cross, for example, as an expression of the balance between the vertical and the horizontal, matter and spirit, birth and rebirth and a mathematical sign.
Last but not least, it is also a reference to the first letter of his name and thus to the wall that determines everything: the wall is his motif, subject and technique at the same time. It is reminiscent of the weathered walls of Barcelona’s old town, a place for communication and a surface inscribed with graffiti and signs of the times.

Thus here is Tapies who joined the Art Informel group of painters, or, as we refer to them in those days, the people who pursued the “poetic of the wall”. Except that the walls erected by Tapies have a further qualification…
Renato Barilli, “Tapies: la materia contro lo spirito, ovvero l’Epifania negata” in Antoni Tapies, Skira, Milan, p. 13