Antonio López

Exhibition catalogue. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza Madrid 28 june - 25 september 2011; Museo de Bellas Artes Bilbao 10 october - 22 january 2012.
The last retrospective exhibition of the work of Antonio López took place in 1993. In the two intervening decades, the artist has continued to evolve and has produced some of his most significant masterworks. The purpose of this exhibition is to present to the public his most recent production and, from that standpoint, to offer a reinterpretation of the artist’s earlier career. The first part of the exhibition explores the major subjects in Antonio López’s works from the last decades, indicating at the same time points of continuity and contrasts with the period before 1990. Those subjects may be reduced essentially to three: the city, trees, and the human figure, manifested in three fundamental media (painting, drawing and sculpture). The second part of the exhibition offers a retrospective overview of Antonio López’s career, from its beginnings to his early mature period. The emphasis is on the human figure, which at another time predominated in the artist’s production. Many of the works in the present exhibition have been loaned fromo private collections, mostly in Spain, including that of the artist himself. A large number of them have never been published or exhibited and some are still unfinished. There are also important loans from institutions such as the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), the Museo de Bellas Artes of Bilbao, the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg) and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition is completed by the projection in one of the galleries of two documentaries made specifically for this occassion. They include images of López working this year, both in his studio an outdoors as well as various interviews by individuals close to him.