THE SPANISH ARTIST ANTONIO LÓPEZ WILL LEAD IN VALLADOLID (SPAIN) A 5-DAYS WORKSHOP FOR ARTISTS FROM THE CREART CITIES

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THE SPANISH ARTIST ANTONIO LÓPEZ WILL LEAD IN VALLADOLID (SPAIN) A 5-DAYS WORKSHOP FOR ARTISTS FROM THE CREART CITIES

2012-11-23

Antonio López will be the master of the first Artist Workshop organised with the framework of the EU funded project CREART (Network of Cities for Artistic Creation).

 

     This workshop, lasting 5 days, intends to approach the experimentation, the artistic creation, and the improvement of the techniques used by the participant artists, from the European Cities of the CREART Network, -with the coordination of the City of Valladolid (Spain). They will have the opportunity to contrast their work with the expert look of Antonio López, one of the most representative figures of Spanish Contemporary Art.

 

A preliminary selection will be made in each one of the CreArt cities - Aveiro, Delft, Linz, Vilnius, Pardubice, Kaunas, Lecce, Kristiansand, Arad, Wroclaw, Harghita and Valladolid- up to 10 candidates and the Director of the Workshop, the artist Antonio López, will finally select a maximum of 25 artists.

 

The online application form to participate in this workshop is available in the following link: http://creart-eu.org/application/antonio-lopez  - and must be submitted before the 14th December 2012. The decision will be announced on or before January 21st 2013

 

THE WORKSHOP OF ANTONIO LÓPEZ

 

The proposal of this workshop with the Spanish master of figuration Antonio López is to deal with different ways of pictorial representation, where the participants will be able to show their interests and ideas, and to work and develop their creative processes close to one of the great artistic references of the Contemporary Realism.

 

Along the practice sessions of this workshop, artists from different countries can share in person advices, comment proceedings, research methodologies and enjoy the explanations about their ideas and projects. Specifically, in this workshop the different perspectives from the genres of the figurative tradition as stilllife, portrait and landscape will be explored.

 

ANTONIO LÓPEZ

 

Antonio López, master of the realistic painting and considered one of the most influential Spanish painters and one of the European representatives of the Contemporary Realism, was born in Tomelloso (Ciudad Real) in 1939. He has been awarded with the most prestigious art prizes in Spain. He received in 1985, the “Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes” and in 2006 the “Premio Velázquez de las Artes Plásticas”. His early vocation for drawing, as well as the influence of his uncle, the painter Antonio López Torres, made up his decision to become an artist when he was only 13 years old. He moved then to Madrid to enter the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, where he stayed between 1950 and1955. In1955 he travelled to Italy, and after finishing his studies, he was professor in the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, from 1965 to 1969. His first big retrospective exhibition took place in 1985. Then other important exhibitions came after, as in the Museum of Modern Art of Brussels, together with another Spanish masters as Tàpies and Chillida, or in New York. In 1993 he was appointed member of the Royal Academy of San Fernando. In 1990 the Spanish film director Víctor Erice filmed the movie “El sol del membrillo”. The film, with Antonio López as protagonist,

talks about the creative process of the artist while painting a quince from his own courtyard. In the same year the Reina Sofía Museum organised a retrospective exhibition. In 2008, the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston dedicated to him a big solo exhibition. Also his painting “Madrid desde Torres Blancas” reached in an auction organised by Christie's in London the amount of 1.918.000 €, which is the highest amount paid until that date to a Spanish artist alive. In 2011, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid organised a temporary exhibition, with artworks of all his periods, but mainly from the last production, that itinerated also to the Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao.

 

Antonio López looks for the reality around the ordinary aspects of life that he depicts with a full attention to detail, touching the photographic genre. His preferences go from different views of Madrid, to family portraits, going also through the most ordinary subjects. He is a unique artist who transmits the necessity of discovering beauty in the surrounding reality. His art transmit a beauty that is something more than an aesthetic quality. The beauty that he searches for in his artworks is a reflex of something deeper and bigger. His work, where a good deal of melancholy and sadness might be found, it is also characterized by a research sense of what is Reality. He contributes with a big knowledge of colour as a real substance, a precise drawing and, above all, a language of shapes that integrates drawing and colour. In repeated occasions he has declared to be a deep admirer of the production of Velázquez. He paints with a great slowness, as a result of his necessity to capture on canvas the infinity of feelings from the contemplation of the subject depicted. Most of his paintings are retouched in multiple occasions until he consider they are completely finished. According to his words, “a work is never finished, but it reaches to the limit of its possibilities”.