Tàpies from Within, 1945-2011

Tapies from Within presents about 100 works from the artist's studio and from the Fundacio Antoni Tapies collection. Accompanying a major touring exhibition in Europe, it guides us through Tapies' entire career, from the first Surrealist-inspired paintings of the 1940s, produced during his participation in the Dau al Set group, to works made shortly before his death in 2011. Thanks to the collaboration of the Tapies family, Tapies from Within offers the most intimate portrait yet published of the painter's working environs, reproducing for the first time works that had remained virtually unseen or even unknown. As this volume makes plain, from almost the outset Tapies was committed to a materialist vision of materials and forms, which in the 1950s led him to make the celebrated "matter" paintings that earned him his international reputation. Rubble, mud, oil stains and graffiti all made their way onto Tapies' canvases, which proposed abstraction as a "concretion" of the world rather than a transcendence of it (his signature crosses being "crossings-out" and not religious symbols): "choosing the earth over the vagaries of the spirit," as he writes in an accompanying essay here. Full of superbly reproduced color plates, Tapies from Within offers an important overview of this major force in postwar abstraction.