Antoni Tàpies dies at the age of 88

Catalan painter,sculptor and art theorist Antoni Tàpies died at the age of 88 in Barcelona, according to media reports.

Tàpies, son of a liberal publisher and a bookseller, began his career in Spain as a surrealist painter influenced by such artists as Paul Klee and Joan Miro.

In the 1940s and 50s, Tàpies introduced the subjects, themes and tropes he was to explore throughout the remainder of his career. As he himself maintains, it was in the late 1950s when he started to find his stride as a mature artist. As he mined the possibilities of this adopted vernacular, Tàpies' signature style gelled in the 1960s and 70s.

At the end of the 1950s and throughout the following decade Tàpies started to play with texture, creating his acclaimed "matter-based" works, coupling this exploration of texture with new iconographic motifs, graphemes, footprints and the prints of his own hands on the canvas.

Tàpies co-opted everyday objects and inserted them in his paintings, transmuting them in the process into something else. In his work from the 1960s and 70s we perceive not only an assuredness in the handling of the form, but also an ideological shift. From the mid 60s well into the 70s, the final years of Franco's regime, his work took on a decidedly political slant.

Alongside his production of pictures and objects, since 1947 Tàpies has been active in the field of graphic work. He has produced a large number of collector’s books and dossiers in close association with poets and writers such as Alberti, Bonnefoy, Du Bouchet, Brodsky, Brossa, Daive, Dupin, Foix, Frémon, Gimferrer, Guillén, Jabès, Mestres Quadreny, Mitscherlich, Paz, Saramago, Takiguchi, Ullán, Valente and Zambrano.

As a gesture of mourning, the Fundación Antoni Tàpies will open over two days to allow people to freely access the building, where works by Tàpies will be exhibited.