Antoni Tapies - Memòria Personal

Lithographic poster by Antoni Tàpies (*).
This work was created for the artist's solo exhibition at Erker Galerie St. Gallen between 1988 and 1989.
Made on high grammage lithographic paper.
Luxury edition limited to 700 copies.

Specifications:

Dimensions: 74 x 54 cm
Year: 1988
Condition: Excellent (this work has never been framed or exhibited, and has always been kept in a professional art folder, therefore offered in very good condition).
Provenance: Private Collection.

The work will be carefully handled and packaged in reinforced cardboard packaging. The shipment will be certified with a tracking number.

The shipment will also include transport insurance for the final value of the work with full reimbursement in case of loss or damage, at no cost to the buyer.

(*) Antoni Tàpies was born in 1923 in Barcelona, Spain. He studied law and drawing at the Valls Academy (1943) at the same time. The military uprising led by General Franco from Morocco spread to all of Spain and led to the Civil War. Antoni Tapiès, an opponent of the interior to the dictator, was definitively marked by this horrific war.
In 1948 he co-founded the group “Dau al Set” and its magazine of the same name. He met Joan Miró. After a period of producing surrealist works, Tapiès became interested in philosophy and Eastern art, especially calligraphy. Tàpies transforms the most diverse materials, often the poorest, into pictorial signs.
His first solo exhibition was organized in 1950. The artist included colors and fossils in blocks pasted with glue, sand, and plaster that would become “walls bearing witness to the martyrdom of our people.” Tapiès used newspapers, pieces of string for social‑provocative collages of meaning.

In 1951, in Paris, he met Braque and Picasso, discovered informal art with Dubuffet and Fautrier and Michel Tapié’s writings. The artist shifted toward more figurative compositions towards the end of the 1960s. The cross is a recurring sign in his work, whether in paintings or graphic works, many of them elaborated in parallel. His torn and scratched compositions continue to express a critical stance. The imprints and traces reveal inner meditation.

From the early 1980s, Tapiès created “installations” and devoted himself to ceramics and mosaic art. From 1962, major museums organized retrospectives of his work (Hanover in 1962, Vienna in 1968, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 1973, a traveling retrospective in the United States in 1988…).

Antoni Tapiès is the author of several written works reflecting on art: “The Practice of Art” (1970), “Art Against Aesthetics” (1974). Antoni Tapiès lived and worked in Barcelona, the city where his Foundation is located, established in 1984. The artist died on February 6, 2012, aged 88.