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this book surveys the work of the celebrated Catalan artist Antoni Ta?pies. Born in Barcelona in 1923, he rose to prominence in the 1950s as an exponent of matter painting, building up large surfaces with combinations of paint, varnish, sand, and powdered marble to create the effect of bas-relief. Increasingly immersing himself in Zen and Taoism, he created an art of deliberate surface ambiguity, suggesting a highly spiritual content through an economy of means. His Black with Red Stripe (1963) in which a solitary chair is set against an empty ground, divided by a startling red line, was compare by critics of the time with the "zip" paintings of American artist Barnett Newman and those of other members of the New York School. In the 1970s, Ta?pies returned to his earlier medium of sand on canvas, now combined with free linear patterns to create rough-textured, organic works. Experimentation with inks and varnishes on flat surfaces has played an important role in his work of the 1980s. Major canvases from each decade are analyzed and reproduced in this volume revealing the range and genius of one of the twentieth century's greatest artists. - Dust jacket.