The largely self-taught Catalan painter Antoni Tàpies was one of the leading European artists of his generation, having come to prominence in the late '40s for his "matter paintings," which utilized unconventional materials such as earth, marble dust, sand, mud, and ground chalk. For Tàpies, even matter was symbolic, as he believed it must also be understood from the perspective of mimesis and alchemy. He placed his work in the realm of the sacred, and his later works continued to reflect his pursuit of creating art that requires internal discovery both on the part of the artist and the viewer.

Tàpies moved on to create symbolic paintings that were influenced by Surrealist painters like Miro and Klee, and by the 1950s he had developed his signature style, which consisted of built-up surfaces that were scratched, pitted, gouged, and carved with letters, numbers, and signs. These works often gave the impression that there was a message to be decoded in the engravings: "My wish," Tàpies has said, "is that we might progressively lose our confidence in what we think we believe and the things we consider stable and secure, in order to remind ourselves of the infinite number of things still waiting to be discovered."

Tàpies's work has been exhibited at numerous international institutions, including retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1995, the Museum of Modern Art in 1992, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid in 1990, among many others. In addition to his artwork, Tàpies published several books, including La pràctica de l'art (1970), L'art contra l'estètica (1974), and Per un art modern i progressista (1985). He established the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona in 1984.