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Artist: Luis Gordillo

Galería Marlborough presents its eighth exhibition of Luis Gordillo at its Madrid headquarters, one of the most significant artists of the national scene. The exhibition, entitled ¡espEren!: ¡peRmanezcan Atentos! is made up of more than twenty works in different techniques: acrylic on canvas, collage, drawing on paper and digital printing on canvas. These works serve as a testimony of the artist's latest production, which follows a line of creation with polyvalent fusions between abstraction and representation through an elaborate formal complexity and his usual heterogeneity of pictorial media.

The career of Luis Gordillo (Seville, 1934) has always been marked by continuous experimentation in an eagerness to discover new artistic horizons, as well as by the change of approaches in his production.

After studying law at the Faculty of Seville (1951-1956), he decided, after receiving drawing and painting classes from Santiago del Campo in 1955, to dedicate himself to art and attended the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de Santa Isabel de Hungría in Seville (1956-1958). In the summer of 1958 he travels to Paris, where he encounters informalist painting and makes his first works of abstract and gestural character. His work begins to gain importance at the beginning of the 60's, gathering three fundamental influences: informalism, Pop art and geometrism. In 1962 the artist took up residence in Madrid and in his creations, from that his creations, from then on, he introduces figurative references, with his own particular interpretation of elements derived from the Pop influenced by the exhibition Arte de América y España, which took place in the palaces of the Retiro in Madrid in 1963. He also began psychoanalysis sessions, a methodology that will be essential to understand the aesthetic construction of his work, which materializes with his series Las cabezas (1963-1965)

According to the critic José Jiménez, Gordillo develops a constant in the sphere of duplication and multiplication: “the recourse to the unfolding of the image is decisive”. His works present “the modulation of the pictorial flow as a sequence”, bringing it closer to cinema or comics. This resource appears in the paintings of the early sixties and is maintained with various inflections in the present exhibition. In 1967 the critic Juan Antonio Aguirre included him in the group “Nueva Generación”. From then on, Gordillo became a bridge artist between the informalist generation and the Nueva Figuración of Madrid in the seventies, being a fundamental reference.

Since the 1970s, he has been experimenting with photography, photocopies and silkscreen printing, creating a “composite art” that, according to curator Christoph Schreier, “sometimes seems hybrid and, in extreme cases, is able to combine the mechanical objectivism of photography with the subjectivity of painting”.

In the eighties his work becomes more complex, organic and cellular, characterized by the duplication and multiplication of motifs and chromatic variations, establishing a personal grammar in which he introduces a heterogeneous constellation of symbolic elements, real or imaginary, which he has been developing in the following decades, as is the case of his individual Dúplex at the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español de Cuenca. Subsequently, the computer as a machine for dissecting and analyzing the pictorial process began to form part of his practice. In so doing, he configures a critical, protean, biomorphic, playful, ironic and subversive style that has had a strong influence on artists of the following generations.

The complexity of Luis Gordillo's work is apparent in his interest in the obsessive investigation of the image, which turns the production process into an essential element of his work, sometimes as important as the final result. Art critic and curator Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo is the author of the text of the catalog.

Luis Gordillo has been awarded numerous prizes and mentions, among them the Spanish National Prize for Plastic Arts (1981), the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts (1996), Knight of Arts and Letters of France (2007), the Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts (2007). At ARCO 2019 he received the Catalina D'Anglade Award.

Among his numerous exhibitions in public spaces include the following anthologies: IVAM, Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (Valencia, 1993); Meadows Museum (Dallas, U.S.A., 1994); MACBA (Barcelona, 1999); Museum Folkwang (Essen, Germany, 2000); MNCARS, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2007); Kunst Museum (Bonn, Germany, 2008); CAC de Málaga (2012); Artium (Vitoria, 2015); CAAC, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (Seville, 2016); Koldo Michelena, (San Sebastián, 2017); CGAC, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Santiago de Compostela, 2017); Patronato de la Alhambra y Generalife y Centro José Guerrero (Granada, 2017-18); Museo Universidad de Navarra (Pamplona, 2021); and Espacio Santa Clara (Seville, 2022).

His work can be found in numerous public and private collections, among which the following stand out: Fundación La Caixa, Barcelona; Fundació Suñol, Barcelona; Museo ICO, Madrid; IVAM, Valencia; Museo de Arte Abstracto, Cuenca; Fundación Juan March, Palma de Mallorca; MACBA, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona; Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao; MNCARS, Madrid; CGAC, Santiago de Compostela; Artium, Vitoria; Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany; Helga de Alvear Collection, Cáceres; CAAC, Seville; Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid; Congreso de los Diputados, Madrid; Fundação Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal.