In the years after World War II, both Europe and America saw the rise of predominantly abstract painting concerned with materials and the expression of gesture and marking. New Yorkers dubbed the development in the U.S. Abstract Expressionism [more], while the French named the pan-European phenomenon of gestural painting Art Informel [more] (literally ”unformed art“). A variety of the latter was Tachisme, from the French word tache, meaning a stain or blot. Antoni Tàpies was among the artists to receive the label Tachiste because of the rich texture and pooled color that seemed to occur accidentally on his canvases.

Tàpies reevaluates humble materials, things of the earth such as sand—which he used in Great Painting—and the refuse of humanity: string, bits of fabric, and straw. By calling attention to this seemingly inconsequential matter, he suggests that beauty can be found in unlikely places. Tàpies sees his works as objects of meditation that every viewer will interpret according to personal experience. ”What I do attempt,“ he maintains, ”is to create images that will cause the observer to look upon reality in a more contemplative way.“

These images often resemble walls that have been scuffed and marred by human intervention and the passage of time. In Great Painting, an ocher skin appears to hang off the surface of the canvas; violence is suggested by the gouge and puncture marks in the dense stratum. These markings recall the scribbling of graffiti, perhaps referring to the public walls covered with slogans and images of protest that the artist saw as a youth in Catalonia—a region in Spain that experienced the harshest repression of the dictator Francisco Franco. Tàpies has called walls the ”witnesses of the martyrdoms and inhuman sufferings inflicted on our people.“ Great Painting suggests the artist’s poetic memorial to those who have perished and those who have endured.