Luis Gordillo

LUIS GORDILLO, (Seville, 1934).
Untitled, 2004.
Mixed media on cardboard.
Signed and dated in the lower right corner.
Work reproduced in the Catalogue of the Exhibition of Caja Granada of the year 2004 (page 25).
Measurements: 46 x 65 cm; 61 x 80 cm (frame).
Luis Gordillo is one of the main figures of abstract art in Spain. Contemporary of the Spanish informalists of the fifties, Gordillo is nevertheless considered the pioneer of one of the most significant tendencies of the Spain of the seventies, the Madrid figuration. At first he studied law in his native Seville, but he soon left this career to devote himself to painting, enrolling in the School of Fine Arts. In 1958 he made a trip to Paris, where he became interested in the work of Jean Fautrier and Jean Dubuffet. During these years he follows an aesthetic path linked to Art Autre and Dau al Set, and holds his first exhibition at the Sala de Información y Turismo in Seville (1959). He will return again to Paris, and it is then when his painting is heading again towards figuration, revealing influences of Francis Bacon and American Pop. Thus, at the beginning of the sixties, his series of Cabezas and Autmovilistas will be the first non-mimetic incursion of a Spanish artist in the international Pop. During these years, moreover, his work was enriched by his incursions into psychoanalysis. He then temporarily abandoned painting and devoted himself to automatic drawing, exhibiting the fruits of this work in 1971 in Madrid. This exhibition was key for a whole generation of young artists, those who would initiate the new figuration in Madrid. During the seventies Gordillo transferred these automatic line drawings to canvas and filled them with color. In the eighties and nineties his language continued to evolve, crystallizing in a colder painting both in terms of color and in his personal detachment from the themes, placing himself halfway between the previous figuration and the new formulas of postmodern abstraction. Of great international prestige, Gordillo has been awarded the National Prize for Plastic Arts (1981), the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts (1996), the Gold Medal of the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid (2004), the Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts (2007) and the National Engraving Prize (2012). Likewise, important exhibitions have been dedicated to him, such as the anthological exhibition of his graphic work held at the Calcografía Nacional in 2012. Throughout his career he has exhibited individually all over the world, and is currently represented in the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, MACBA in Barcelona, the Juan March Foundation, the ARTIUM in Vitoria, the Patio Herreriano Museum in Valladolid, the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the Folkwag Museum in Germany, etc.