| | PUBLISHER
Fundación Colección Thyssen-BornemiszaBOOK FORMAT
Clth, 9.5 x 10.75 in. / 264 pgs / 176 color / 45 bw. PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 10/31/2011
Out of print DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2012 p. 18 PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9788415113119 TRADE
List Price: $60.00 CAD $70.00 AVAILABILITY
Not available | TERRITORY
WORLD | EXHIBITION SCHEDULEMadrid
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, 06/28/11-09/25/11
Bilbao
Museo de Bellas Artes, 10/10/11-01/11/12 | | THE FALL 2024 ARTBOOK | D.A.P. CATALOG  | | Preview our FALL 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
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| | | FUNDACIóN COLECCIóN THYSSEN-BORNEMISZAAntonio LópezIntroduction by Aurelio Martínez Estévez, Guillermo Solana. Text by Antonio López, Maria López Moreno, Guillermo Solana, Javier Viar, Paula Luengo.
 Antonio López--also known as Antonio López García--is hyper-realism’s greatest living exponent, and one of the finest painters of the past hundred years. Published on the occasion of the artist’s landmark exhibition at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, this generous overview constitutes a self-portrait of a genuine icon of contemporary painting. It spans the years from 1953 to the present, placing an emphasis on works made after 1993 (the year of the artist’s last retrospective exhibition in Spain, at the Reina Sofia Museum). These more recent pieces include masterworks such as “View of Madrid from the Vallecas Fire Tower” (1990–2006) and the monumental heads “Day,” “Night” and “Woman, Coslada” (2010). The artist himself has selected the works and structured their presentation here into eight thematic groupings: “Memory,” “Surroundings,” “Madrid,” “Gran Vía,” “Tree,” “Nude,” “Characters” and “Interiors.” Full-color reproductions are complemented by a wealth of archival documentary photographs of the artist at work.
Antonio López García was born in Tomelloso, in the heart of Spain, a few months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. He studied at the School of Art in Madrid in the early 1950s, where he soon proved himself a brilliant student, and quickly became part of a nucleus of realist painters, such as Francisco López Hernández, Amalia Avia and Isabel Quintanilla. López García was the subject of Víctor Erice’s 1992 film El Sol del Membrillo (The Quince Tree of the Sun), which closely chronicles the artist’s attempts to paint a quince tree.
Featured image is Antonio López in his studio, 1973. It is reproduced from Antonio López. |
| | | FROM THE BOOK"With this exhibition, which spans work from 1953 to the present, I have above all sought to present paintings, sculptures and drawings executed after 1993, the year of my retrospective exhibition at the Reina Sofía Museum. Since then, now eighteen years ago, I have worked as constantly as ever, and, as always, on many things at once and in an apparently anarchic fashion, but this is the way I work. Some of the pieces completed during these years will be here. There will also be others on which I continue to work and that will be shown in the midst of that process. Still others will have to wait for subsequent exhibitions.
The subjects that have moved me as points of departure continue to be the same ones, I think, that moved me from almost the very beginning: human figures, alone or in pairs, dressed or nude and within their spaces, which are my spaces; rooms; landscapes, almost always urban; trees; flowers; food. The differences or changes in my way of interpreting them have not been voluntary, in general, but rather are the result of the transformations imposed by the passage of time, which marks our physical being and inevitably affects everything we do. It will be interesting to see together these fifty-eight years covered by the exhibition. Above all for me.
I believe that I quickly found my world, but I have taken a long time to make myself, to purify myself and to be myself as I am. And I dream of continuity; my wish is to continue representing the visible world and to return to the human figure—which I have left so abandoned, for reasons that I cannot fully fathom—in its individuality and in its actions."
- Antonio López | FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG TODD BRADWAY | DATE 7/12/2011 ARTBOOK | D.A.P. Director of Title Acquisitions Todd Bradway traveled to Madrid, Spain, in late June to attend the opening of renowned figurative painter and sculptor Antonio López’s retrospective exhibition at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. This is the first of three blogs chronicling Todd's stay in Madrid, which included multiple visits to the museum, a studio visit with the artist and his wife, and a trip to TF Editores, who is printing D.A.P.'s forthcoming publication, Antonio López García: Paintings and Sculpture, which will release in the United States in September of this year. continue to blogFROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG TODD BRADWAY | DATE 7/20/2011 On June 29th, ARTBOOK | D.A.P.’s Todd Bradway had the rare opportunity to visit legendary Spanish figurative painter and sculptor Antonio López García at his studio in Madrid. continue to blog | |
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