Antoni Tàpies

ANTONI TÀPIES PUIG (Barcelona, 1923–2012).
“Papers from Son Armadans,” 1960.
Mixed media on paper.
Certificate of authenticity issued by the Tàpies Committee is included.
Signed in the upper right corner,
Measurements: 19 x 13 cm.
This work is associated with the literary and artistic magazine *Papeles de Son Armadans*, a leading publication in postwar Spanish culture, published in Madrid and Palma de Mallorca. The piece appears in issue no. 57, from 1960, dedicated to Antoni Tàpies, and illustrates the cover of the essay “Antonio Tápies,” written by the German art critic and historian Udo Kultermann.
Created at a particularly significant moment in Tàpies’s career, the piece reflects his consolidation within material and informalist painting. The artist had gradually moved away from figurative representation to explore the expressive possibilities of the material, incorporating dense surfaces, marks, textures, and elements drawn from everyday life.Its small format does not detract from the composition’s intensity; rather, it concentrates within a limited space some of the elements that characterized his artistic language during those years, such as direct intervention on the support, the importance of texture, and a conception of painting understood as material and trace.
Initially self-taught, Tàpies took up drawing and painting at a very young age, and during the 1940s he came into contact with the European avant-garde and contemporary thought. In 1948, he was one of the founders of the Dau al Set group. Throughout his career, he held exhibitions around the world, in prominent galleries and museums such as the Guggenheim in New York and the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. His awards include the Prince of Asturias Award, the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association, the National Culture Award, the Grand Prize for Painting in France, among others, and retrospective exhibitions have been dedicated to him in Tokyo, New York, Rome, Amsterdam, Madrid, Venice, Milan, Vienna, and Brussels. His works are represented in major national and international museums, such as the foundation that bears his name in Barcelona, the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Guggenheims in Berlin, Bilbao, and New York, the Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan, MoMA in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London.