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 with clay and marble powder in his paintings, along with diverse items such as ropes, knives, objects, paper, string and rags. Tàpies’ international reputation was already well established by the late 1950s and, decades later, he would become one of the most revolutionary artists of the 20th century, a precursor of art languages, forms and materials, creating a vast legacy for the history of art.
“I believe that all of contemporary art was influenced by non-Western art. However, I arrived at Asian art through my interest in science, at a time when I was curious about nature, about the structure of matter and the problems of space, time and causality. We felt a sort of general disappointment with Western civilization. It had led us to terrible wars and we became somewhat exasperated with Western culture. This instigated me to study the philosophy and culture of other civilizations, especially those of India, and, in a very concrete form, of Buddhism in China and Taoism, first in China and later in Japan”, reveals Tàpies.
All his geniality, studies and knowledge led him to give life to abandoned materials. Discarded objects took on new meaning in his body of work. Everything acquired a new function in the ‘magic' spheres of his paintings and joined the whole without an apparent order or rationale. Tàpies caused a scandal back in the 1940s by adding sand and earth to his oil paintings “in a very spontaneous and a bit innocent manner, and it was an exaggeration…”, reflects the artist.
Antoni Tàpies also characterized his works and created an artistic identity by not making isolated paintings, but creating series of works. “As soon as I finish a painting, I place it immediately in another room. And the next painting I make will already be a function of that previous work. I interweave the phrases, if you will, and in the end there will be a group of works that share an expressive harmony and, I believe, an internal logic. In other words, I’m more concerned with the development of the art in general and not with each individual work at a time”, states the artist in an interview with Fabio Magalhães, in October 2004.
The artist was awarded the Golden Lion at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993. A retrospective exhibition was presented at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum SoHo in New York in 1994–95. In 2000 the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid organized a major retrospective of the artist’s work. Tàpies died in Barcelona on February 6, 2012.