Eduardo Arroyo

EDUARDO ARROYO (Madrid, 1937-2018).
"La fanciulla del West", 1990.
Work consisting of a hat-sculpture, a graphic work and a drawing.
Measurements: 35.5 x 27 cm; 53 x 45 cm (drawing frame) / 48 x 19.5 (plate); 75 x 53 cm (paper) and 84 x 62 cm (graphic work frame).
The title of this work by Eduardo Arroyo refers us to Puccini's opera of the same name. The lady, of whom we see only the head in both the drawing and the graphic work, seems to refer to the protagonist of that Italian work, whose name was Minni. On both occasions she is represented with Arroyo's characteristic ironic bias, adorning her head with a cactus for a hat. In fact, Arroyo pours all of his inventiveness into the creation of a hat-sculpture that three-dimensionally reproduces what is represented on paper, as if it were props or costumes from Puccini's opera. He can interpret the cactus motif as a metaphorical image of the Californian desert where the opera's plot takes place.
Painter, sculptor and engraver, Arroyo stands out as an important figure within the neofigurativist movement. After beginning his career in journalism, he began to paint at the end of the fifties, appearing for the first time at the Young Painting Salon in Paris in 1960. At the beginning of the sixties his plastic vocabulary moved under the North American influence of pop. art, and around 1964 his break with informal art became definitive. His first public impact occurred in 1963, when he presented a series of effigies of dictators at the III Paris Biennale that provoked protests from the Spanish government. That same year, Arroyo prepared an exhibition at the Biosca gallery in Madrid, which would open without his presence since he had to flee to France, pursued by the police; The exhibition was censored and closed a few days later. However, Arroyo's figurative option was slow to be accepted in Paris. The painter rejected the unconditional devotion to some avant-garde artists, such as Duchamp or Miró, which he considered imposed by fashion. Actually, his interest is to demystify the great masters and defend the role of the market as protector and thermometer of art, against the network of museums and influences funded with public money. In 1974, Arroyo was expelled from Spain by the regime, and would not recover his passport until Franco's death. However, his critical takeoff in Spain was not immediate, and would take until the early eighties. In 1982 he was awarded the National Prize for Plastic Arts, and anthological exhibitions were dedicated to him in the National Library of Madrid and the Pompidou Center in Paris. Currently, Arroyo is represented in the Reina Sofía National Museum in Madrid, the Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, the Fine Arts Museum in Bilbao, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. and the Modern Art Museum of Lille (France), among others.