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82 - 82. 82AR ANTONI TÀPIES (1923-2012) Footprints on sand 1972 s…
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Estimate €100,000 - €150,000
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82. 82AR ANTONI TÀPIES (1923-2012) Footprints on sand 1972 signed on reverse oil, charcoal and sand on canvas 81 x 100 cm. 31 7/8 x 39 3/8 in. Made in 1972. Provenance Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris Martha Jackson Gallery, New York Private collection, Spain Sale: Versailles Enchères, Versailles, Paintings, Abstracts and Contemporaries, Sculptures, 16 December 2007, lot 161 Galerie Bernard Cats, Brussels Acquired from this gallery by the current owner Exhibition New York, Martha Jackson Gallery, Tapiès: works 1969-1972, 8 November - 15 December 1973, n.p., illustrated in black and white Bibliography Pere Gimferrer, Tàpiès i l'esprit català, Paris 1976, p. 44, pl. 59, illustrated in black and white; p. 258, pl. 278, illustrated in colour Josep Vallès Rovira, Tàpies Empremta (art-vida), Barcelona 1983, p. 241, illustrated in black and white Anna Agustí, Robert Marrast, Tàpies: Catalogue Raisonné, Volume 3. 1969-1975, Cologne 1999, p. 294, no. 2543, illustrated in colour Just as beauty makes shadows quiver, no noise dares to bloom beside a work that a light hand has caressed. Empreintes de pied sur du sable (Footprints on sand), created in 1972, is one of those paintings that carries with it the smell of the earth waking up after the rain, a dawn touched by the sun, a delicious hour... As a lover of the material, Antoni Tàpies came to play a very personal expressive range on this unctuous canvas, because the artist knows that a brushstroke can scratch the support like a knife or brush against it like a ray of light. It was in 1943, after a long convalescence, that the Catalan painter embarked on an artistic career. A friend of philosophers and writers, he founded the avant-garde movement and magazine Dau al Set with the poet Joan Brossa; the trace, the sign and the symbol being substantial in his creation, on the edge of figuration and abstraction. Convinced that a human and artistic complicity would emerge from this meeting, the collector Joan Prats invited Antoni Tàpiès to Joan Miró's studio, where his art was awakened to the magical dimension of images. From the 1950s onwards, the young painter incorporated new iconographic elements (anthropomorphic references, crosses, writing, etc.), allowing his emotions to emerge in a material that was now infatuated with everyday life and poetry. Following post-aesthetic paths, Antoni Tàpies gained international recognition and exhibited in Paris. In 1952, he was invited to the Venice Biennale, and the following year the famous Martha Jackson Gallery gave him a solo exhibition when it opened in New York. In 1958, at the request of the famous art critic Jacques Dupin, he was invited to exhibit at the Galleria dell'Ariete in Milan. In a perfect balance between reason and instinct, his works evoke a human and cosmic world in an expressive blossoming, a language infatuated with matter and symbolic gesture. The painter owes this ellipsis of meaning to his simmering love affair with Dadaism and Surrealism. From the former, the artist retains the heterodox mysticism, from the latter the Jungian study. The primitive aura of his paintings, in which the object and the being commune between unreality and reality, evokes an ancestral form of painting: the graphein, the product of the coexistence of the written word and the image. The line, in all his works, is fertile. From his free wrist, Antoni Tàpies gives us fragments, like the graffiti that appeared on the walls of Spanish houses, in a silent protest against Francoism, from which his work inherited a tragic dimension. In 1962, the Guggenheim (New York) dedicated a major retrospective to him, and his works became part of masterly public and private collections. For decades, the Maeght gallery in Paris devoted solo exhibitions to him, confirming the accuracy of his approach and his immense talent. When a museum and library were inaugurated at the Tàpiès Foundation (Barcelona) in 1990, the artist declared, with votive humility: "My illusion is that I have something to pass on. If I can't change the world, I at least want to change the way people look at it". In this shifting earth tinted with bistre sand, the painter conjures up the ephemeral, our finitude, which he transmutes into a talisman, a prayer (perhaps the dream of Ademar de Borros), while the artist, with infinite gentleness, retains the imprint of the first man.
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About the sale Post-War & Contemporary Art including the Cluzel Collection
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Auction time 06/04/2026 at 4:00 PM
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