LUIS GORDILLO (Seville, 1934)Four eyes, 1990.Mixed media on canvas.Signed, dated and titled on the

LUIS GORDILLO (Seville, 1934)
"Four eyes", 1990.
Mixed media on canvas.
Signed, dated and titled on the back.
Size: 35 x 54 cm; 40 x 59 cm (frame).
This work was conceived by the artist at a time when, after abandoning the pop style, he decided to contribute to a more abstract language. However, in this piece we can appreciate, slightly, this oscillation of styles that interweave with each other, contributing a totally new and personal aesthetic language. It is worth noting that during the nineties he produced several works in which the eyes played a leading role, thus creating a work that looks at the spectator, an active piece that no longer depends on being observed by the public.
Luis Gordillo is one of the leading figures of abstract art in Spain. A contemporary of the Spanish informalists of the 1950s, Gordillo is nevertheless considered the pioneer of one of the most significant trends in Spain in the 1970s, the figuration of Madrid. He initially studied law in his native Seville, but soon abandoned this career to devote himself to painting, enrolling at the School of Fine Arts. In 1958 he travelled to Paris, where he became interested in the work of Jean Fautrier and Jean Dubuffet. During these years he followed an aesthetic path linked to Art Autre and Dau al Set, and held his first exhibition at the Sala de Información y Turismo in Seville (1959). He returned to Paris, and it was then that his painting moved back towards figuration, revealing influences of Francis Bacon and American Pop Art. Thus, in the early 1960s his series of Heads and Motorists was the first non-mimetic incursion by a Spanish artist into international Pop art. During these years, moreover, his work was enriched by his incursions into psychoanalysis. He then temporarily abandoned painting and devoted himself to automatic drawing, exhibiting the fruits of this work in 1971 in Madrid. This exhibition was key for a whole generation of young artists, those who would initiate the new figuration in Madrid. During the seventies Gordillo transferred these automatic line drawings to canvas and filled them with colour. In the eighties and nineties his language continued to evolve, crystallising in a colder painting, both in terms of colour and in his personal detachment from the themes, placing himself halfway between the previous figuration and the new formulas of post-modern abstraction. Of great international prestige, Gordillo has been awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (1981), the Medalla de Oro al Mérito en las Bellas Artes (1996), the Medalla de Oro del Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid (2004), the Premio Velázquez de Artes Plásticas (2007) and the Premio Nacional de Grabado (2012). He has also been the subject of important exhibitions, such as the anthological exhibition of his graphic work held at the Calcografía Nacional in 2012. Throughout his career he has had solo exhibitions all over the world, and is currently represented at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, MACBA in Barcelona, the Juan March Foundation, the ARTIUM in Vitoria, the Patio Herreriano Museum in Valladolid, the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the Folkwag Museum in Germany, etc.