Luis Gordillo

Seville, 1934

Luis Gordillo lives and works in Madrid and his artistic career began in the mid-1950s. He travelled to Paris (1958-1959) to extend his knowledge and was attracted to Dubuffet, Fautrier and Wols, while his painting follows the currents of informalist abstraction and art autre. After returning from Paris, he passed through a crisis and gave up painting. He began to paint again in 1963, influenced by pop art. At the close of this stage of training, he experimented with geometry. In the 1970s, he launched a stage of research that led him to use new artificial and acid tones and he experimented with image reproduction techniques. In the 1980s, Gordillo’s painting became more complex, organic and cellular and his series of works from that time are characterised by repetition and the multiplicity of images, as well as the confrontation between gestural and rational painting. In 1970 and 1976, he took part in the Venice Biennale and 1971, the São Paulo Biennale. Retrospective exhibitions of his work have been mounted at the IVAM, Valencia (1993), the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (1999), the Museu d’Art Espanyol Contemporani, Palma (2004) and the  Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2007), among others. In 1981, he received the National Plastic Arts Prize and in 2007, the Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts.

E.B.