Antoni Tàpies combined his pigments with marble dust, resin, and other non-art materials to create rough, densely worked surfaces, a technique that he called pintura matèrica (material or “matter” painting). Gray Relief with Oval is one of a series of works that evoke the somber and weather-worn walls of the artist’s native Catalonia, which had borne witness to decades of hardship brought about by the Spanish Civil War and General Franco’s dictatorship (1936–75). Tàpies stated: “My walls . . . do not avoid their responsibility and hold their full archetypal or symbolic weight.”