MADRID, SPAIN.- The Museo Reina Sofia presents Tapies. Tierras, on view through January 11, 2005. This exhibition celebrates the Velazquez art award given to Tapies in 2003. The exhibition presents one of the lesser known facets of this Spanish artist. In 1981 the artist first contacted the Hans Spinner ceramic shop. Since then, he begins to create works with cooked soils. Although some exhibitions have featured ceramics by Tapies, they have been eclipsed by his paintings. This exhibition features 46 works and is complemented by a selection of large works on paper relating to these works.

Antoni Tàpies was born in Barcelona in 1923, the son of the lawyer Josep Tàpies i Mestres and Maria Puig i Guerra, who came from a family of booksellers and Catalan nationalist politicians, deeply involved in public life at the time. He is brought up in an open, tolerant cultural atmosphere, which owes much to his father’s friendship with important public figures. He studied elementary school at Colegio de las monjas de Loreto, Escuela Alemana and Escuelas Pías in Barcelona. In 1934 he begins secondary school. First contact with contemporary art through a number of Catalan publications, especially the special Christmas number of the magazine "D’Ací i d’Allà", coordinated by Josep Lluís Sert and Joan Prats, with texts by Zervos, Foix and Gasch, among others, and reproductions of works by Picasso, Braque, Gris, Léger, Mondrian, Brancusi, Kandinsky, Duchamp, Arp and Miró. 1936-1939 - During the Spanish Civil War he continues his studies at the Liceo Práctico in Barcelona, and for a few months works at the Generalitat de Catalunya, where his father is legal advisor. He teaches himself drawing and painting. The end of the war —with the defeat of the legitimate democratic government of the Second Republic and the beginning of General Franco’s dictatorship— is to leave a deep mark on many aspects of his life and artistic career.