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Antonio Tàpies comes from a bourgeois Barcelonan family, who achieved outstanding results in plastic arts as a rebel, with incursions in diverse currents, from expressionism to pop-art, passing over to surrealism He was born in Barcelona in 1923, in the in the bosom of a bourgeois family of tradition Catalan nationalist. Of self-educated formation, his first portraits passed to a series of paintings of marked appearance expressionist. At the beginning of the '40's, he worked under the influence of Paul Klee and Max Ernst.
In 1948, he was one of the founders of the
Dau al Set group, one of the first and more relevant initiatives renovators of post-war Spanish art.
In 1950 he celebrated his first individual exposition in Galeries Laietanes. In the beginning of the 50’s he lived in Paris, with a scholarship from the French Government.
In 1953 he abandoned surrealism and returned the investigations over matter, initiated towards a decade, working with earth, grattages, collages and incisions. He started to develop his own language. Coinciding with this change he exhibited in the Martha Jackson Gallery (New York) and in the 24th Biennial one of Venice (1952), in the Gallery and he received the grand award of Painting of the Biennial of São Paulo (1953).
In the same year he returned to abstract and started to work in mixed technique. This phase marked his more original art contribution, adding mud and marble dust to his painting and using, as well, paper, string and cloth (Grey and Green Painting, Tate Gallery, London 1957). His had gained his international reputation then.
Since 1970, influenced by American pop-art, he started to incorporate other objects in his painting, like pieces of furniture. An infinite love for material is conjugated in his work, with the iconographic dimension that is expressed through signs such as crosses, lines, numbers, letters and initials of his name, with a strong use of objects and a personal incorporation of elements of oriental cultures.
Antonio Tàpies' ideas has had a great influence worldwide, especially in the painting field, as well as sculpture, lithography and recording.
Politically linked to Catalan nationalism, not precisely specifically pro-independent, but extremely anti-Franco, this facet can be noted in his work, such as the El Espíritu Catalán - Catalan Spirit - (1971).
After the inauguration in Barcelona in 1990 of the
Fundació Tàpies, reference point for many artists, Tàpies was awarded at multiple times, such as the León de Oro (Golden Lion) in the Venice Biennale (1993) or the Herbert Boeckl Award (1994). He was also elected, that same year, as the member of the French Academy of Fine Arts.
In 2003, on his 80th birthday, he celebrated with an open day that united nearly 700 people that had the opportunity to see his best art works in the Foundtion that bears his name.
As such it was in 2004 when the major homage of Tàpies took place, in the
MACBA: a great retrospective in where 150 works were exhibited, from 40 years ago till the present, from paintings, sculptures and drawings. In it the exploration of natural matter was proposed by Tàpies, an octogenarian in action.