(Barcelona 1923–2012)
Relief rouge sur fond noir, 1961, signed and dated on the reverse, mixed media (oil and sand) on canvas, 114 x 146 cm, framed

Provenance:
Galerie Stadler, Paris
Galerie Burén, Stockholm
Thomas Segal Gallery, Boston (label on the reverse)
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Hannover, Antoni Tàpies, Kestner-Gesellschaft, 14 February - 1 April 1962, exh. cat. p. 36, no. 84 with ill.
Zurich, Antoni Tàpies, Kunsthaus, 29 April - 3 June 1962, exh. cat. p. 37, no. 86 with ill.
Verona, Dadaismo Dadaismi, da Duchamp a Warhol, Palazzo Forti, 18 July - 9 November 1997(label on the reverse), exh. cat. p. 152, no. 139, with ill.

Literature:
G. Gatt (ed.), Antoni Tàpies, Cappelli Editore, Bologna 1967 , pl. 127 (b/w)
A. Agustí (ed.), Tàpies, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, 1961–1968, Könemann, Cologne 1999, p. 33, no. 941 with ill.

Tàpies creates his own personal reality - pictorial landscapes whose formal tension derives from a contrast between empty, silent spaces and shaped configurations, between positive and negative, between projections and depressions, between chance and order, freedom and control.
Some of the artist's works put one in mind of crumbling walls, inscribed with enigmatic markings reminiscent of Assyrian or Egyptian pictographs, which elude rational explanation but nonetheless seem to bear witness to lives once lived in some distant past. Others reveal primeval landscapes, lost continents, the ground plans of buried fortifications, craters and sand dunes, blown by winds off the ocean.
These are not metaphysical but tellurian landscapes, very much of the earth in that they point far back in time to forms of pre-existence on our planet. Often dark, dun, apparently monochrome but actually shot through with an extraordinarily subtle range of color, Tàpies’ paintings seem removed from the context of current time. They possess a strange dignity and serenity and suggest a positive reaction to the enigmas of the universe, which we know are insoluble despite nuclear fission, space travel, gene technology, and futurological predictions. Tàpies creates "counter-images," the replies of a thinking artist, on the one hand, to the restlessness and high-tech euphoria from which we both suffer and know to be our future, and on the other to the permanently lurking threat of nothingness.
K. Ruhrberg, M. Schneckenburger, C.Fricke, K. Honnef, I. F. Wahlter (ed.), Art of the 20th Century, Taschen, 2012, p. 261