Antoni Tàpies y Puig, (1923 – 2012) was a Spanish painter and sculptor who became one of the most famous European artists of his generation.  From the early 70s, Tàpies’ oeuvre increasingly pays homage to his Catalan identity following his experience of the Spanish Civil war in 1936, which abruptly ended Catalonian independence. General Franco who ruled over Spain as military dictator was an anathema to Tàpies and his works acted as a protest as well as a manifestation of aesthetic modernity. Directly representing the struggle for Catalonian identity, this image features the colours of the Catalonian national flag: vivid red stripes against a yellow ground superimposed on symbolic text .

Provenance: Private collection Stuttgart.