RIP: Antoni Tàpies

 

Madera y Rascada, Tapiès.

 

 

Two days ago, died this well-known Catalan artist, so I decided to write a post on his memory. I must admit that I was not a follower of his work, and I had to find out afterwards.

I think it was a transgressor person  in his field, ahead of his time, blending Surrealism, Dadaism with a  wide range of textures that results brilliant .There are many aspects that did not know, as he made ​​stage sets and posters, thank goodness that exists the Wikipedia to illustrate me, haha.

I copy some parts of his life so you can discover a little more of who he was:

 

In 1948, Tàpies helped co-found the first Post-War Movement in Spain known as Dau al Set which was connected to the Surrealist and Dadaist Movements. He started as a surrealist painter, his early works were influenced by Paul Klee and Joan Miró; but soon become an informal artist, working in a style known as pintura matèrica, in which non artistic materials are incorporated into the paintings. 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 (Grey and Green Painting, Tate Gallery, London, 1957).

 

From about 1970 (influenced by Pop art) he began incorporating more substantial objects into his paintings, such as parts of furniture. Tàpies's ideas have had worldwide influence on art, especially in the realms of painting, sculpture, etchings and lithography. Examples of his work are found in numerous major international collections. His work is associated with both Tachisme and Abstract Expressionism.

The paintings produced by Tàpies later in the 1970s and in the 1980s reveal his application of this aesthetic of meditative emptiness, for example in spray-painted canvases with linear elements suggestive of Oriental calligraphy, in mixed-media paintings that extended the vocabulary of Art informel, and in his oblique allusions to imagery within a fundamentally abstract idiom, as in Imprint of a Basket on Cloth (1980). Among the artists' work linked in style to that of Tàpies is that of the American painter Julian Schnabel as both have been connected to the art term "Matter".

In 1984 Tàpies created the Tàpies Foundation, dedicated to the study of modern art. In 1990 it opened a museum and library in the premises of a former publishing house in Barcelona. Its holdings include nearly 2,000 examples of his work.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_T%C3%A0pies