Tàpies is a seminal name in Informalismo and the

 Dau al Set 

a multidisciplinary Spanish avant-garde group founded in 1948 in Barcelona by Joan Brossa, Joan Ponç, Antoni Tàpies, Modest Cuixart, Joan-Josep Tharrats and the philosopher Arnau Puig, around the journal with the same name. Originally connected to Surrealism, it forged a unique style of its own defined by its endeavour to merge literature and painting.

group. Always socially and politically committed, from the 1950s onwards he engaged in a purely that he would never abandon and in which matter and form went hand in hand.

An overall view of his practice in the 1950s would reveal that Tàpies did not limit himself to any one formula or style. Indeed, apart from delimiting his matter-based territory, he continued to display a boundless creative freedom, as in the work at hand.

In this composition, human presence merges in the backdrop that acts as a wall, where one can see the mark left by a hand. The world of signs that would become a constant in Tàpies’ work is already foreshadowed here, combining Oriental influences with the medieval philosophy of Ramón Llull (1232-1316), on whose writings the artist created an exceptional bibliophilic edition in 1985.