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'Tapies was a largely self-taught Spanish abstract painter whose seductive tactile surfaces, often scratched with mysterious graffiti-like marks, made use of unconventional materials like marble dust, ground chalk, sand and earth.
He came to prominence in the late 1940s with richly symbolic paintings strongly influenced by Surrealist painters such as Miro and Klee - a style he abandoned by the mid-1950s as he turned to what became his signature work: the heavily built-up surfaces that were often pitted and gouged and incised with letters, numbers and signs.
Using a wide variety of materials, on canvases and boards that often-suggested walls, doors, windows or gates, he grounded his work in the brute reality of the Spanish street and in the turbulent political dramas of his youth in Catalonia, including the Spanish Civil War and the Catalan nationalist movement.
The rich textures and sober use of colour in his paintings lent a moving solemnity to works that seemed to have been not so much painted as excavated from an idiosyncratic compound of elemental materials.
Tapies chafed at being characterized as an abstract painter. At the same time, here fused to explicate the tantalizing scratches, letters and crosses that seemed to offer the viewer a text. His dreamlike symbols, fished from the soup of the unconscious, suggested an ancient language waiting to be deciphered, but the artist declined to assist' - New York Times.
The book provides an overview of the artist's life and career, and also includes original translations from the Catalan of four of the artist's principal writings on art.
This volume is the catalogue of an exhibition organized by the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in collaboration with the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris. It presents the essentials of Tapies's art - an original use of texture and materials, coupled with an expression of intense intellectual, political and artistic feeling.
Large square quarto hardcover, colour illustrations. Minor wear only; near fine in a dust jacket and protected by a Brodart protective book cover.
Jacket Condition: Very Good to Fine
Large colour photographs throughout.
Published by Guggenheim Museum Publications, New York NY, 1995.
Binding Condition: Fine
Overall Condition: Very Good to Fine.
Size: Quarto, 284 mm X 305 mm X 28 mm
229pages.
ISBN0810968819
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