Lot 59 | Antoni Tàpies | Red painting

The development of his own visual language
Antoni Tàpies is considered one of the most remarkable artists of post-war modernism. He is undisputedly one of the elite of Spanish painting, his name mentioned in the same breath as Goya, El Greco, Velazques, Miró, and Picasso. Already skilled in drawing and copying works of fine art during his school days, he devoted himself entirely to painting after a brief period of studying law and a two-month taster course at the academy in Barcelona. He lived in Paris for a while, traveled to Holland and Belgium, got to know New York, and soon became one of the leading representatives of informal painting. From the 1960s onwards, the artist gained international recognition and received numerous prizes and awards.
While his fairy-tale-like, surreal early work from the 1940s still shows influences from Joan Miró and Paul Klee, a decade later Tàpies found his own distinctive visual language, in which material, color, and symbols became vehicles for spiritual and existential experience. These works elude the quick glance and unfold their effect in silence and concentration—they are neither pleasing nor seductive. In their ascetic austerity and spiritual depth, they open up enigmatic pictorial spaces whose mystery is hidden behind the visible surface.

In the tension between red and black
While most of the artist's works are presented in a rather monochrome palette of ochre, gray, and brown tones, the appeal of color stands out impressively in this painting. It captivates with its intense, bright red coloration that completely permeates the pictorial space. The red unfolds an almost glowing presence, while the incorporated black lends the picture a palpable heaviness. The black mark at the top of the picture appears like an archaic trace or a fragment of writing—it dominates the red surface with a powerful gesture and lends the painting a mysterious, symbolic dimension. Further dark areas in multifaceted variations between jet black and slate are loosely distributed across the surface, appearing like informal spots or scars in the paint layer and lending the surface a dynamically moving structure and expressiveness. The tension between the radiant red and the earthy black manifests Tàpies' characteristic combination of material substance and spiritual depth.
Doris Hansmann