Tapies: The Complete Works : 1976-1981: 4 - Tapa dura

This fourth volume of the complete works of Tapies, a series which is planned to include a total of seven volumes, covers the period between 1976 to 1981. In this period, the number of openly political statements in Tapies' work begins to decline significantly, due in part to Spain's democratization. Once again, the artist was free to energetically devote himself to tackling artistic problems, searching for new pictorial approaches and technical procedures, and experimenting with new materials and instruments. In the second half of the seventies and in the early eighties, Tapies' work is characterized mainly by stringent formal simplification, and consequently, by univocal motifs. He returns to hermetic walls, and offsets large surfaces with geometrical structures straddling the central object. This is also a period of suggestive relief effects produced by objects covered by large canvases, and works that reproduce the imprint of objects from everyday life pressed onto a still-moist medium.

Anna Agustí, art historian and specialist in the work of Tàpies, is responsible for the catalog as a whole and for the cataloging criteria; the chronology and bibliography have been prepared by Miquel Tàpies, director of the Antoni Tàpies Foundation; the foreword has been written by Jacques Dupin, writer, poet, and author of numerous studies on contemporary artists.