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| (Photo: poul webb art blog) |
An enigmatic artist who celebrated the most humble things
SPAIN (The Guardian) The distinguished Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies, who has died aged 88, conceived of his work as a form of meditation on "the void" – more specifically, "that play of emptiness and fullness which composes everything and which reveals the meaning of nature". He expressed this esoteric philosophy, partly inspired by Zen Buddhism, through a multiplicity of potent, often paradoxical, objects. In his "matter paintings", Tàpies mixed pigment and varnish with unconventional materials, including marble dust and sand, to create dense, wall-like surfaces that are both blank and teasingly mysterious. He also frequently included cruciform shapes that look less like Christian symbols than negative marks on a child's exercise book, the signatures of the illiterate, or even distortions of the artist's own initial. Clearly he relished the ambiguity. (Read The Guardian's full obituary)
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