Antonio Lopez

Antonio López - White Lily

Biografía del Artista: He began his training with his uncle, the painter Antonio López Torres. In 1949 he travelled to Madrid to prepare for admission to the San Fernando School of Fine Arts, where he studied painting between 1950 and 1955. In 1955 he received a travel grant from the Ministry of National Education with which he travelled to Italy. In 1958 he won the Fine Arts competition in the “Still Life” section of the Rodríguez Acosta Foundation, for which he received a grant with which he travelled to Greece, and returned to Italy, where he visited Rome, thanks to another grant from the Ministry of Education. After finishing his studies, his work included elements from different artistic movements such as Cubism and Surrealism, the latter being the most recurrent as they helped him to reinforce the narrative character of his works. From the sixties onwards he began to abandon the dreamlike and gradually developed a more objective approach. His motifs are portraits of people in his environment, interiors, still lifes and urban landscapes, which serve as a background for still lifes and scenes with figures. His sculptural work developed in parallel with his painting and drawing, creating reliefs in different materials, as well as his first free-standing pieces. Between 1964 and 1969 he taught the Preparatory Course of Colour at the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando. Afterwards he gave occasional courses, devoting himself entirely to artistic creation. He has participated in numerous collective exhibitions and has been the protagonist of several solo shows, among which those held at the Staempfli Gallery in New York in 1965 and 1968 and at the Marlborough Gallery (New York and London) in 1986 stand out for their impact. In 1985 he represented Spain at Europalia 85, Brussels, together with the artists Eduardo Chillida and Antoni Tàpies. In 1990, the film director Víctor Erice shot the feature film El sol del membrillo, focusing on the creative process of Antonio López, which later won the International Critics' Prize at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, the Golden Hugo for Best Fiction Film at the Chicago International Film Festival, and the Ontario Cinematheque Award for Best Film of the Decade in 1999. In 1993 he held his first retrospective exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, which was very well received by the public and critics. Two years later, in 1995, he was selected to participate in the exhibition Identità e alterità, curated by Jean Claire, presented first at the Palazzo Grassi and then at the Museo Correr, both in Venice, Italy. In 1999, the Valladolid City Council commissioned Antonio López and the sculptors Francisco and Julio López Hernández to create a monumental sculpture of the Kings of Spain, which was inaugurated in 2001 in the Cloister of the Museo de San Benito in Valladolid -Patio Herreriano-. In October of the same year 2001, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía celebrated, with a small exhibition and publication, the acquisition of the sculptures Hombre y Mujer and nineteen of his preparatory drawings, which are added to three other important works by Antonio López belonging to the permanent collection of the museum. In 2006, he presented his largest urban painting to date, Madrid from the Vallecas Fire Station Tower, to the Madrid Assembly. It is over four metres wide and represents almost the entire surface of the city seen from that point. In 2008, he completed his first solo public monumental sculpture commission, two large three-metre-high bronze monumental heads, Night and Day, which are located next to Madrid's Atocha station. In April 2008, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston held a solo exhibition with him in parallel to a historical exhibition that dealt with Spanish art during the reign of Philip III: El Greco to Velázquez, Art During the Reign of Philip III. In October 2010, his second public sculpture, The Woman from Coslada, was inaugurated on Avenida de la Constitución in the Madrid municipality. In June 2011, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum opened a solo exhibition that combines a retrospective nature with the presentation of his most recent work, which had not yet seen the light of day. This exhibition, which was on display from June to September 2011, also travelled in October of that same year to the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, where it remained until January 2012. The following year, another solo exhibition of his work travelled to various museums in Japan, beginning on 27 April at the Bunkamura Museum of Art in Tokyo. He was invited by Vittorio Sgarvi to participate in the well-known La Milanesiana festival in 2014, where a special exhibition was organised in which his oil painting and drawing The Supper in front of the Supper at Emmaus by Caravaggio were presented, which enabled a new reading of these works. In December of the same year he presented the painting The Family of Juan Carlos I, a large-format work – 300 x 340 cm – which has become part of the collections of the National Heritage. This work was presented as part of an exhibition on the royal portrait at the Royal Palace in Madrid: The portrait in the royal collections. From Juan de Flandes to Antonio López. During that same month, two exhibitions were inaugurated in Vicenza, Italy, in which he participated: a solo exhibition dedicated to his figure – Antonio López García – and a large collective exhibition dedicated to the night – Tutankhamun, Caravaggio, Van Gogh. The exhibition will be held at the Notre Dame de Paris, with works by great international artists from past and contemporary centuries, including Zurbarán, Van Gogh, Rothko and Francis Bacon. Thus, more than forty years after his last solo exhibition, Antonio López is showing his most recent work to the Italian public, who have given it a warm welcome. Antonio's work was once again presented to the Madrid public in February 2016, on the occasion of the opening of an exhibition at the Thyssen Museum on the Madrid Realists group, which included the artist alongside his colleagues and friends since his training: Isabel Quintanilla, Julio and Francisco López, María Moreno, Amalia Avia and Esperanza Parada. In September 2020, a retrospective exhibition opens at the Bancaja Foundation in Valencia, featuring a wide selection of recent and ongoing works. The exhibition, curated by Tomás and Boye Llorens, also shows a select selection of works by María Moreno. The following year, the Community of Madrid dedicates a tribute exhibition to her, displaying her monumental sculptures, Carmen despierta y dormida, at the Real Casa de Correos in Madrid. During his professional career he has received numerous awards and appointments, including the Gold Medal of Fine Arts (1983); the Pablo Iglesias Award (1983); the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts (1985); Full Member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando (1993); Patron of the Museo del Prado (1998-2009); Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York (2004); the Ciudad Alcalá de Henares Award for the Arts (2004); the Medal of Honor (2004) of the Menéndez Pelayo International University of Santander; the Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts (2006); the Gold Medal of Fine Arts of the Madrid City Council (2010); Honorary Academician of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos in Valencia (2017). Lives and works in Madrid.