The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum hosts a big exhibition with the old and most recent work by the Spanish painter Antonio López. This is a ‘must’ in our visit in Madrid during the summer.

This exhibition has an autobiographical statement and we will be able to see and discover the paintings, sculptures and drawings by this exceptional artist. We will make a walk through Madrid’s views, his town, Tomelloso, where he was born and we will see his gardens and trees.

López's themes

Visitors can thus appreciate the recurring themes in the universe of Antonio López and the influence of artistic tradition and his connections with it, given that the artist considers himself the heir to that tradition to an almost obsessive degree. His sensitivity to the human figure is equally present in both the sculptures and drawings.

The exhibition opens in the temporary exhibition galleries on the Museum’s ground floor with a room that aims to summarise López’s work and the vision that he has of himself as an artist and as heir to the tradition of art. This space constitutes a survey of the three major groups into which López’s output can be divided and includes his masterpieces of the last twenty years.

It features almost all his celebrated views of the city of Madrid and of one of its most famous streets, the Gran Vía, including the series on this subject on which the artist is currently working. There will also be a comprehensive selection of drawings and paintings on another of López’s principal subjects: the tree and his own kitchen garden. Also on display are representations of the human figure, a motif central to his output in both sculpture and drawing and one that reveals his continued.

The exhibition continues on the first basement level, arranged both thematically and chronologically in a display that runs from the artist’s earliest years in Tomelloso, with individual figure studies, pairs of figures, landscapes and interiors, up to works that have been loaned directly from the artist’s studio and are now shown to the public for the first time.

Finally, the exhibition is completed with the projection of two documentaries that show work of Antonio López during the last year in his studio and outdoors. Also on Saturdays in July will be screening the film El Sol del Membrillo by Víctor Erice in which we will see López painting a quince tree in the courtyard of his house to explore the process behind the creation of a work art.

Selection from the artist

The exhibition is articulated through the artist’s own gaze on his recent and earlier work, given that López has steered the selection of works and overseen their installation, working with the two curators, his daughter María López and Guillermo Solana, the Museum’s Artistic Director, as well as with the exhibition’s technical curator, Paula Luengo.

Many of the works in the present exhibition have been loaned from 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, Bilbao, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Antonio López
Place: Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. Palacio de Villahermosa. 8, Paseo del Prado
Dates: June 28th to September 25th, 2011
Timetable: Tuesday to Saturday from 10.00 am. to 11.00 pm. Sundays from 10.00 am. to 07.00 pm.
Price: 10 EUR for general admission. Reduced admission 7 EUR. Temporary and permanent exhibition: 14 EUR for general admission and 8.50 reduced. Free for children under 12 years and citizens in legal unemployment.

Remember if you want to visit several museums in one day you have the Madrid Card, which you can access the exhibits without waiting queues. Here we suggest some tours with the card of 120 hours.