Antonio tapies biography

Antoni Tàpies was.
Antoni Tàpies i Puig, 1st Marquess of Tàpies was a Catalan painter, sculptor, and art theorist.
Antoni Tàpies was a Catalan artist, credited with introducing contemporary abstract painting into Spain.

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Tàpies was self-taught artist, learning how to draw and paint on his own, while he was still going to school. He has his first contact with contemporary art as teenager. His initial steps as a painter were as a Surrealist, much influenced by Paul Klee and Joan Miró, but this was a short-lived phase. The artist soon began working in a style known as matter painting (pintura matèrica), a pictorial trend of the post-Second World War period that was part of the Art Informel, or Informalism, movement in Europe where non-artistic materials were incorporated into the works of art. This informalism was nothing more than a “style” that replaced formal art of the 1940s and 1950s, hence causing some bewilderment. In 1948, Tàpies helped found the first Post-War Movement in Spain, known as Dau Al Set, a movement that was connected to Surrealism and Dadaism.

In 1953, Tàpies began working with mixed media, which was to be considered his most original contribution to the art world as he was one of the pioneers using this technique. He began

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Antoni Tapies Biography

Catalan painter and graphic artist who began his career as a surrealist with no formal training. Co-founder of the group centred around the magazine 'Dau al Set' in Barcelona. In 1950-51 he went on a French government scolarship to Paris and in 1953 visited New York for his first American exhibition. He has won numerous prizes including the prize for painting at the 1958 Venice Biennale. Tapies was influenced by Dubuffet and Miro and he became very aware of the heritage he shared with Miro (there are considerable similarities between the two artists' prints of the late 1960's).

Characteristic work by Tapies includes paintings with thickly impastoed, scratched or scraped paint in a dramatic style with austere imagery and earthy colour. All this may relate strongly to the character of the spanish countryside. In the mid-1950's Tapies became concerned with the physical evidence of man's journey through his environment. His work increasingly began to emulate the decay and ware through time or defacement of doors and walls. He used areas of sand and plast

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Painter, sculptor, printmaker, and art theorist Antonio Tapies was born on December 13, 1923, in Barcelona, Spain. An early interest in art during led him to teach himself how to draw, as the influences of Spanish Modernists reigned during the Spanish Civil War. This era also helped form the young artist's identity as a Catalonian and would often address this political siding in his later works. Tapies formal education began with the pursuit of law at the German School of Barcelona, but by 1943 he began devoting more of his time to painting as well as the study of Eastern philosophy and the works of Sartre. In the late 1940s he learned the art of lithography and intaglio printmaking, and would go on to collaborate with a variety of writers to illustrate their works. In 1948 he co-founded the post-war avant-garde movement Dau al Set, which was heavily influenced by Dadaism and Surrealism, and allowed him to translate the existential component of his philosophical studies into visual representation.

By the early 1950s Tapies's style had turned toward Abstraction. He b