Madrid, Spain – From June 28th through September 25th, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid is presenting a temporary exhibition that offers a complete overview of the work of the Spanish artist Antonio López (born Tomelloso, 1936). The exhibition is articulated through the artist’s own gaze on his recent and earlier work, given that López has steered the selection of works and overseen their installation, working with the curators. The result is a major exhibition of an almost autobiographical nature. Works from the last twenty years, which will arrive at the Museum directly from the artist’s studio and which represent almost half of the 140 works on display, are displayed alongside others created in the more distant past, as far back as the 1950’s.
Rather than a chronological presentation, the exhibition moves backwards and forwards within the oeuvre of Antonio López, who, as is clearly evident, remains active and working. This is clearly manifested in the Museum’s galleries, in which paintings, drawings and sculptures coexist in a balanced manner, representing the three media in which the artist has worked over the course of his career. López’s celebrated views of Madrid, including his most recent depictions of the Gran Vía, are shown here alongside depictions of his native Tomelloso, paintings and drawings of fruit trees, portraits of paired figures and interiors. Visitors can thus appreciate the recurring themes in the universe of Antonio López and the influence of artistic tradition and his connections with it, given that the artist considers himself the heir to that tradition to an almost obsessive degree.
López García was born January 6, 1936 in Tomelloso, Ciudad Real , a few months before the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. It first appeared that Antonio would continue in the family tradition as a farmer, but an early facility for drawing caught the attention of his uncle Antonio Lopez Torres, a local painter of landscapes, who gave him his first lessons. In 1949 he moved to Madrid in order to study for entrance to the competitive Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. Between 1950 and 1955 he studied art at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, winning a number of prizes. He formed friendships with Francisco Lopez Hernandez, Amalia Avia, and Isabel Quintanilla. Out of this nucleus a realist group was formed in Madrid. Madrid of the postwar period was isolated from the international panorama of art and culture.
All the information that López García accessed on contemporary art was derived from library books at the school; he gradually became aware of Pablo Picasso and other great artists of the period. In 1955, a scholarship allowed him to travel to Italy with Francisco Lopez and study Italian painting from the Renaissance. During this period he began to reevaluate Spanish painting in the Prado, especially Velázquez, a constant reference. By 1957 his work had registered a certain surreal quality. Magic Realism continued to inform his work through the mid-1960s, but gradually, as he said, “the physical world gained more prestige in my eyes.” In fact he had never abandoned it.
Some of his relief sculptures conjure fantastic episodes, such as “The Apparition” (1963), in which a child hovers mid-air against a wall, gliding toward an open door. There are many affinities with the Tuscan Renaissance in his work in three dimensions. García’s painting also reverberates with the art of the past. “The Grapevine” (1960) evokes Tiepolo’s sunlight, “The Quince Tree” (1962) Chardin’s dusky murk, and other paintings echo Old Masters from Albrecht Dürer to Edgar Degas. Though López García is devoted to the mundane — he depicts humble people, buildings, plants, and cluttered interiors — his portrayal of these subjects is compelling and beautiful. He began to paint panoramic views of Madrid about 1960. His work from this period attracted recognition, first within Spain — in 1961 he had his first solo show in Madrid — and later, in 1965 and 1968, at the Staempfli Gallery in New York. López García faithfully adhered to familiar subjects: images of women, anonymous and humble objects of domestic surroundings, desolate spaces, images of his garden and landscape. The pictures are sometimes worked on for more than twenty years, some of them remaining unfinished. He is a versatile realist, proficient in the traditional media of pencil drawing, oil painting on board, carved wood sculpture, and bas relief in plaster.
The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Spanish), is one of the three Madrid museums that make up the “Golden Triangle of Art”, which also includes the Prado and the Reina Sofia (modern and contemporary) galleries. The collections’s roots lie in the privately owned Thyssen-Bonremisza collection, once the second largest private art collection in the world (after the British Royal Collection). When Baron Thyssen decided to open his collection to the public, he conducted a Europe-wide search for a new home. The competition was won in 1986 when the Spanish government came to an agreement to provide a home for the collection (the 19th century Villahermosa Palace close to the Prado in Madrid) and fund the museum in return for the loan of the collection for a minimum of nine and a half years. Pritzker prize winning Spanish architect, Rafael Moneo was employed to redesign and extend the building and the museum opened in 1992. However, so impressed were the Thyssen-Bornemiszas with the building and Spain’s commitment to the collection, that even before it opened, they were negotiating with the Spanish government to make the museum permanent. In 1993, the Spanish government agreed to buy the collection (valued at up to 1.5 billion dollars) for $350 million and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum became a permanent fixture in Madrid. The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum offers visitors an overview of art from the 13th century to the late 20th century. In the nearly one thousand works on display, visitors can contemplate the major periods and pictorial schools of western art such as the Renaissance, Mannerism, the Baroque, Rococo, Romanticism and the art of the 19th and 20th centuries up to Pop Art. The museum also features works from some movements not represented in state-owned collections, such as Impressionism, Fauvism, German Expressionism and the experimental avant-garde movements of the early 20th century. In addition, it boasts an important collection of 19th-century American painting not found in any other European museum institutions. Visit the museum’s website at : http://www.museothyssen.org