Antoni Tapies dabbled in Surrealism under the influence of Paul Klee and Joan Miro but soon become an Abstract Expressionist, first in the context of Arte Povera and then as an early-defining-practitioner of mixed media, stirring clay and marble dust into his work and adding cloth, string and paper. He became one of Spain's greatest artists, and one of his generation's greatest, winner of the Venice Biennale's Golden Lion and the subject of Guggenheim and Jeu de Paume retrospectives. This eighth volume of his catalogue raisonne assembles his most recent work, from 1998 to 2004. In recent years he has consolidated and condensed an artistic language that expresses in visual terms, first, his conception of art, and, second, intimate philosophical concerns to which he has returned with the passage of time. His forms, despite their ductility, remain faithful to their origins: these works are at once of the moment, of the contemporary world, and a record, an analysis, of his career.

Antoni Tapies belongs to the first generation of modern artists whose careers deweloped in Spain, and in Catalonia particularly, after the Civil War. The leading role played by materials and textures within his creative universe,combined with his distinctive sense of colour,provide fine examples of the nature of his work, in which nothing proves insignificant, and everything has a profound meaning expressing the true reality of the world.

Thpies inhabits an uncertain territory halfway between perceptive experience and transcendental contemplation. His oeuvre contains frequent references to Paul Klee, one of the masters of the historical avant-garde whose work exerted a greater influence on his career, and to Joan Mir6, with whom he shared his Surrealist roots. In fact the links between Mir6 and Tapies reconstruct a specifically Catalan modernist tradition, interrupted though not invalidated by the Civil War and the ensuing Franco regime.