Antoni Tàpies

Galerie Stadler, Paris
Acquired directly from the above in 1963

Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Antoni Tàpies. Paintings and Graphics 1950-1980, 1980, p. 42 and p. 19, no. 29, illustrated in colour

Michel Tapié, Antoni Tàpies, Milan 1969, pl. 170, illustrated in colour
Anna Agustí, Antoni Tàpies, The Complete Works: 1961-1968, Vol. 2, Barcelona 1980, p. 142, no. 1147, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the black tone is slightly lighter in the original. Condition: This work is very good condition. There are several characteristic and stable drying cracks scattered throughout, which are inherent to the artist's choice of media and visible in the catalogue illustration. There are a few losses towards the centre of the left overturn edge, the lower left corner and towards the centre of the bottom edge, which are visible in the catalogue illustration. Close inspection reveals a very fine line of cracking to the upper centre of the top overturn-edge. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals a small area of retouching to the centre of the left extreme edge and three to the bottom extreme edge of which one is located towards the bottom left corner, one to the left centre and one to the right corner tip.
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Described as "a work of unparalleled quality" by Edy de Wilde, director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam on the occasion of  Antoni Tàpies's 1980 retrospective, the exquisite Negro con Dos Rombos, executed in 1963, perfectly embodies the aesthetic alchemy that is so characteristic of the artist's best works. The deep rich grey tones are instantly hypnotic, drawing the viewer into an endless dark abyss. Tàpies developed a style that involved covering his canvases with a thick, highly textured base using elements such as clay, marble dust, sand, glue and oil paint. This elaborate impasto allowed Tàpies to replicate the surface of walls and to vigorously incise and inscribe them, as in Negro con Dos Rombos.  A comparable work, Grey Relief on Black from 1959 in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, shares similar formal qualities and the same dark palette.

Veering between moments of solidity and those of genuine vulnerability, Tàpies' marks on the surface are permeated with a powerful symbolism. "Painting can be everything. It can be a brilliant sun ray. It can be a man's footstep on life's path or why not a foot stamping the ground to say 'enough'. It can be the soft air full of morning promise or an acrid prison stench. It can be blood stains from a wound or the song of all people in the blue and yellow sky. It can be what we are, what is today, now, what will be always" (The artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Waddington Galleries, Antoni Tàpies, 2006, p. 7). Tàpies was fascinated by the spiritual and mystical aspects of his art and sought to render this visible in his paintings.

Tàpies believed that the notion and employment of materials was related to Mediaeval mysticism, magic, and alchemy and his interest focused especially on the potential evocative power that certain substances could produce. Tàpies' convictions and working method followed a two-year long convalescence from a lung disease in 1940, which made him immobile and forced him to explore his imagination and a mystical interior space. Confined to his bed, and facing a wardrobe and mirror, Tàpies spent most of his time drawing and travelling in his mind and it was here where he began his first experiments with art. In 1954 these early ideas and experimentations eventually led Tàpies' style to evolve into his signature and innovative abstraction.

Intrinsically charged, this new body of works established Tàpies as an internationally revered artist by the end of the 1950s. With gallery representation in France, the United States, Italy and Germany and having already exhibited at the Venice Biennale and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1960), Tàpies had his first retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New Yorkin 1962. Negro con Dos Rombos is a beautifully testimony to the peak of the artist's career.