Antoni Tàpies

ANTONI TÀPIES PUIG (Barcelona, 1923 - 2012).
"Quatre franges", 1975.
Etching and carborundum engraving, HC copy.
Signed and justified.
Measurements: 43.5 x 63 cm.(footprint); 57 x 77 cm.(paper); 71 x 91.5 cm.(frame).
BIBLIOGRAPHY .
Mariuccia Galfetti, "Antoni Tápies. Obra Gráfica 1973-78", Ed. Gustavo Gili, Barcelona 1980, nº 509, p. 125.

Created in 1975, "Quatre franges" belongs to a moment of full maturity in the graphic career of Antoni Tàpies, when the artist had consolidated a radically personal language based on the expressive force of matter, the sign and the trace. The work is organized by means of a structure of vertical stripes that order the composition and generate a severe, almost architectural rhythm, on which black gestures, linear graphics and small signs in relief of reddish tonality unfold.
The title, "Quatre franges", refers to the presence of four clearly differentiated compositional fields. In the symbolic context of Tàpies, this arrangement can be related to his interest in signs of identity, collective memory and visual codes with cultural roots, without ever losing the poetic ambiguity that characterizes his work. The forms do not describe, but suggest: they are presented as traces, incisions or marks on a surface with a strong physical and spiritual charge.

The combination of etching and carborundum is especially significant in this piece. Etching allows the incorporation of incisive lines and spontaneous graphics, while carborundum provides density, texture and a tactile quality close to material painting. This technique, widely explored by Tàpies in his graphic production, allowed him to transfer to paper the essential values of his pictorial work: the roughness, the depth of the blacks, the tension between emptiness and gesture, and the almost corporeal presence of the support.

Antoni Tàpies is considered one of the fundamental figures of European art in the second half of the 20th century. Co-founder of Dau al Set, from the late 1940s he developed a language linked to informalism and material abstraction, in which he integrated signs, crosses, letters, numbers, traces and eroded surfaces as elements of reflection on matter, time, the body and memory. His work is preserved in leading institutions such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the MACBA and the Fondation Maeght, among others. Awarded, among other recognitions, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale and the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts, Tàpies developed a graphic production of great relevance, highly appreciated by collectors for its technical quality, aesthetic coherence and close relationship with the major themes of his painting.