Regarded as Spain's greatest living artist, Catalan painter Antoni Tapies (born 1923) is the subject of a comprehensive retrospective currently showing at the Hara Museum of Art in Tokyo's Shinagawa Ward.
He is known chiefly for his abstract canvases, and the self-taught Tapies has fused influences from a wide variety of sources -- from Picasso, naturally but also from Art Brut and Surrealism -- with his personal experiences of growing up in a Barcelona torn by the Spanish Civil War.
Tapies is renowned for a style sometimes referred to as "matter painting" -- due to its use of soil mixed with oil paint to create rough, textured canvases whose scraped surfaces stress the pure physicality of things. It makes you think of Spanish walls, and appropriately, Tapies' name means "wall" in Catalan.