Today we approach the life and work of Antonio López, master of hyperrealism, in love with Madrid, its streets and roofs, a Man from La Mancha born in Tomelloso in January 1936 in a farmers family right before the Spanish civil war.
Excellent video on his retrospective at the Thyssen Museum, 2011
Antonio López, the child supposed to be an administrative assistant, managed to change his future leading it to painting and arts world, cheered up by his uncle, the painter Antonio López Torres .
The unfinished work, outskirts, human body and Gran Vía (Spanish)
When he was only 13, little Antonio moved from Tomelloso to Madrid where he achieved to be admitted at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Arts Academy), in a change that made him feel in his right habitat, a dream come true: to devote his life to painting.
Disappointed on seeing for the first time the paintings of the artists he loved, he needed a while to value them properly. To the young painter, people were not able to explain what they watched when facing a masterwork; in that very moment, probably the hyper-realism seed had already ripened in his artistic vein and would accompany him all over his life.
More than 50 years of creativity and experiences can be fit into three big themes: Madrid famous landscapes, his orchard and garden and the representation of the human shape. All over his work, what the artist wishes the most is to transmit with obsessive and detailed precision what he sees in that exact moment.
For Antonio López, reality is something you can see, something everybody can see, but the possibility of painting is not immediate, it is not specially easy. Light is essential in his creative process , because light is the beginning of the reality and the starting point of his work. Furthermore, his paintings are never finished, the maximum approach to reality is a neverending process, his paintings are a continuous metamorphosis, he changes, corrects, restores and repaints one time and another the same painting, having even recovered works from his clients for giving them one “last detail”.
Antonio López García is without any doubt the most important painter and sculptor in the Spanish contemporary realism, the meticulousness in his works has made his production of “painted photographies” not so prolific, that’s why his paintings have reached incalculable values even before his existance. None Spanish artist represented by Marlborough has such a long waiting list, circumstance, among others, that made him the most valued alive Spanish artist.
During these days Antonio López’s works are travelling to Japan for their first time. The Bunkamura Museum of Art in Tokio hosts the exhibition of 64 masterpieces and will be opened until June 26.