Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, Spain, 1923 – 2012) replaced pictorial illusion with physical presence, treating the canvas not as a window onto another world but as a wall: a surface that could be scored, cracked, punctured, and inscribed the way decades of history mark an actual stretch of city plaster.

Largely self-taught after abandoning law studies, Tàpies co-founded Dau al Set in Barcelona in 1948, the first significant postwar art movement in Franco-era Spain, working alongside the poet Joan Brossa in a milieu steeped in Catalan culture, Surrealism, and a shared resistance to academic convention. By the early 1950s he had moved from magic-inflected figuration toward the matter paintings that would define his career, encouraged by his own encounter with the work of Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier but rooted just as much in the physical texture of postwar Barcelona itself, its damaged walls, painted-over graffiti, and improvised repairs.