Antoni Tàpies was born in Barcelona and studied law before turning to visual art. His youthful experiences of the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona had a deep and lasting effect on him. Tàpies began to paint in 1946 and commented that even then his work had something of graffiti and protest of the streets in it. He was a founder member of the Dau al Set group between 1948 and 1951 during their Surrealist phase, but began to make collages in the early 1950s. During the 1950s he also began to travel, to Paris, the Netherlands, England and the United States. He is most associated with Arte Povera, constructing art from discarded materials such as rags, cardboard, torn canvases and string, making marks on them which, he argued, did not require an artistic education to comprehend. ‘Empreintes de Pas’, incorporating as it does one of the most primal of all ‘prints’, is a perfect embodiment of this principle.