Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012)
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTOR
Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012)

Tot marró amb rellen (All Brown with Relief)

Details
Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012)
Tot marró amb rellen (All Brown with Relief)
signed and dated 'tàpies 1961' (on the reverse)
mixed media on canvas
23 5/8 x 31 7/8in. (60 x 81cm.)
Executed in 1961
Provenance
Galerie Stadler, Paris.
Acquired directly from the above by the previous owners in the early 1960s.
Thence by descent to the present owner.
Literature
A. Agustí, Tàpies, The Complete Works, 1961-1968, vol. II, Barcelona 1990, p. 485, no. 971 (illustrated, p. 50).
Exhibited
Lunds, Lunds Konsthall, Antoni Tàpies, 1993-1994, no. 971 (illustrated in colour, p. 68). This exhibition later travelled to Stockholm, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde.
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.

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Katharine Arnold
Katharine Arnold

Lot Essay

‘I regard mysticism as a state of mind which is necessary to scientific thinking, as well as to art: it enables one to discover things which cannot be found by other means’
ANTONI TÀPIES


Confronting the viewer like an ancient relic, Antoni Tàpies’ Tot marró amb rellen (All Brown with Relief) trembles with raw material power. Rising from the surface of the canvas in rough-hewn, granular layers, the work resembles a slab of crumbling earth or fragment of a faded mural, muddied and fractured with the scars of time. Executed in 1961, during a period of growing international acclaim for the artist, it belongs to the series of so-called ‘matter’ paintings that first developed in the mid-1950s and would occupy him throughout his career. Materially grounded yet metaphysically conceived, these works constitute a profound enquiry into the spiritual properties of earthbound media. Fascinated by the notion of human trace, Tàpies was deeply influenced by the weatherbeaten, war-torn walls of his native Catalonia, and the ghosts that quivered within their silent, stony forms.

‘The mystical consciousness – almost indefinable – seems fundamental for an artist’, he explained. ‘It is like a “suffering” of reality, a state of constant hyper-sensitivity to everything that surrounds us, good and bad, light and darkness. It is like a voyage to the centre of the universe which furnishes the perspective necessary for placing all things of life in their real dimension’ (A. Tàpies, ‘I am a Catalan’, 1971, reproduced in K. Stiles and P. Selz (eds)., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 1996, p. 56). In his bid to glimpse the external forces that underpin the material world, Tàpies assumed the role of medium, channelling the invisible fluctuations of the cosmos. In the present work, signs of physical presence hover in thick, fossilised layers, heavy with the untold mysteries of their making.

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