Due to this, Tàpies grew up in an environment where he was exposed to a variety of cultural and social experiences of leaders in the Catalan public life and its republicanism.

He became inspired by famous Christmas issue of the magazine, D’ací i d’allà, which contained reproductions of works by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, Wassily Kandinsky, and Pablo Picasso.

[6] Tàpies first came into contact with contemporary art as a teenager through the magazine D’Ací i D’Allà, published in Barcelona, and during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), while he was still at school, he taught himself to draw and paint.

Canvas Burned to Matter from c. 1960, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is an example of the artist's mixed media assemblages that combine the principles of Dada and Surrealism.

From the late 1950s to early 1960s, Tàpies worked with Enrique Tábara, Antonio Saura, Manolo Millares, and many other Spanish Informalist artists.

In 1966, he was arrested at a clandestine assembly at the University of Barcelona; his work of the early 1970s is marked by symbols of Catalan identity (which was anathema to Franco).

[11] In 1974 he made a series of lithographs called Assassins and displayed them in the Galerie Maeght in Paris, in honour of militant anarchist Salvador Puig Antich's memory.

The paintings produced by Tàpies, later in the 1970s and in the 1980s, reveal his application of this aesthetic of meditative emptiness, for example in spray-painted canvases with linear elements suggestive of Oriental calligraphy, in mixed-media paintings that extended the vocabulary of Art informel, and in his oblique allusions to imagery within a fundamentally abstract idiom, as in Imprint of a Basket on Cloth (1980).

[8] Among the artists' work linked in style to that of Tàpies is that of the American painter Julian Schnabel as both have been connected to the art term "Matter".

He produced collector’s books and dossiers in association with poets and writers such as Alberti, Bonnefoy, Du Bouchet, Brodsky, Brossa, Daive, Dupin, Foix, Frémon, Gimferrer, Guillén, Jabès, Mestres Quadreny, Mitscherlich, Paz, Saramago, Takiguchi, Ullán, Valente, and Zambrano.

[15] Throughout the span of his life, Tàpies was associated with a number of movements such as Art Informel and Haute Pâte, both of which were popular in post-war Europe.