Tàpies, Antoni (Antoni Tàpies Puig) [key], 1923–2012, Catalan artist. Largely self-taught, he became a painter after first studying law. His earliest works were inventive arrangements of objects against dark backgrounds; those of the 1940s–mid-50s show the influence of Klee and Miró and later of Dubuffet. His best-known works are those that he created in the late 1950s and 1960s. Their uniquely tactile surfaces are heavily built-up in subtle greys and browns made up of such materials as sand, marble dust, ground chalk, and earth, and those surfaces are marked, scratched, and gouged with enigmatic symbols.
See his Memoria personal (1977; tr. A Personal Memoir: Fragments for an Autobiobraphy, 2009); B. Catoir, Conversations with Antoni Tàpies (1991); R. Penrose, Tàpies (1978).
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