Antoni Tàpies

Antoni Tàpies i Puig (Barcelona, 13 December 1923 - Barcelona, 6 February 2012) was the master mason of postwar European painting: on his canvases, matter behaves like plaster and crust. From 1943 to 1946 he studied Law at the Universitat de Barcelona; in 1944 he attended the Acadèmia Valls for two months, then trained largely as a self taught artist. In 1948 he co founded Dau al Set, an avant garde crucible through which he moved toward Art Informel and material painting: sand, powders, rags, and incised marks turn the picture into a wall crossed by crosses, letters, and scratches. His international stature begins here. Tàpies shifts painting from representation to experience, making the humble a shared grammar. In Gran pintura (1958) the surface becomes time laid down in layers; in Llit marró (1960) the image becomes a physical trace, almost architectural. In 1962 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York dedicated a retrospective to him. Awards and honours include the prize at the 2nd Bienal de São Paulo (1953); the UNESCO Prize (1958) and the David E. Bright Foundation Award (1958) at the Venice Biennale; the Rubenspreis of the city of Siegen (1972); the Wolf Prize in Art (1981), joint winner with Marc Chagall; the Medalla d’Or of the Generalitat de Catalunya (1983); the Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes (1990) and the Praemium Imperiale for Painting (1990); the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for Rinzen (1993) and the UNESCO Picasso Medal (1993); and the Premio Velázquez de Artes Plásticas (2003). In 1984 he established the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, which opened in June 1990 with Núvol i cadira (1990). He published La pràctica de l’art (1970) and L’art contra l’estètica (1974). On 9 April 2010 he was appointed Marqués de Tàpies.