Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera presented this Thursday the first retrospective exhibition in Barcelona of the realist painter and sculptor Antonio López (Tomelloso, Ciudad Real, 1936). With a careful selection of about eighty works of painting, sculpture, and drawing from different public and private collections, this monographic exhibition allows tracing a journey through López's artistic career. The exhibition reviews seven decades of work, from his first youthful pieces in the 1950s to his most recent production. Domestic interiors, landscapes, urban views of Madrid, still lifes, and human figures are the main thematic axes. The exhibition can be visited from this Friday until January 14, 2024.
The retrospective of the foremost representative of the Spanish realist movement of the second half of the 20th century shows how the motifs that interest the artist evolve throughout his career. There are also a diversity of pieces still in creation. Detail, corners, stillness, silence, and austerity are some of the protagonists of the works, which express the intimacy of the domestic environment and universal human values. Through light and mastery of space, López invites the visitor into a universe where objects are eternalized in the highest degree of beauty, reports ACN.
In Antonio López, one can see how in the 1950s the artist explored different plastic languages in search of his own and how he resorted to symbolic and surrealist elements to reinforce the narrative component of his works, but always working from figuration. In the 1960s, he painted his first landscape, Madrid (1960), and became aware that his path was reality "without artifice." From the mid-1960s, he painted and sculpted what interested him without using any stylistic resource, so his gaze is "the only filter and technical mastery is his instrument."
At the end of the decade, using this new approach, he directly draws and paints intimate spaces of his house and studio, dedicating "special attention to light and the effects it generates on objects." From there, López achieves international recognition.
In the exhibition at La Pedrera, it can also be seen how the city of Madrid occupies a privileged place in his work. From the 80s, the artist became interested in plant themes. Finally, from the 21st century, he will focus on women and the human figure, with a special interest in the nude.
Antonio López has admitted that encountering his works again is always something he "fears," because after a while they might "not please you" and that "would sink him." López has applauded the work done in the exhibition because it allows seeing "deep areas" of his work that are "revealing" and have taught him "a lot about his own work."
He gave as an example some figures installed at the beginning of the tour that represent him, his daughters, and other characters who have inspired him. López reviewed the artistic influences that have marked him, such as contemporary art, Greece, the real world, or the subconscious. About surrealism, the painter said that he understood it because he "lived life."
"It is something that is not of the objective world, it is above and below. 20th-century painting gives a name to a gaze that was already in ancient art. We have given it the name of surrealism, but this had already been in art through the spiritual part," he stated.
He also admitted that in his youth he had difficulty understanding Spanish art. "It was an enormous effort. It seems to me the most difficult art to understand of all," he pointed out. "We love it because it is ours, but it is an extremely anti-rhetorical and naked art. It is stripped of everything, you need to know a lot," he emphasized. "I went to the Prado every week and I had no inquiry or answer that served me for anything at that time," he explained.
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