BOSTON, MA - The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), will present the first retrospective at an American museum of the works of contemporary Spanish artist Antonio López García during an exhibition to run April 13 through July 27, 2008. Antonio López García will feature approximately 45 paintings, drawings, and sculpture by the celebrated artist of the realist school, including nine works from the MFA’s collection and loans from European and American museums and private collections.
 
(The exhibition will complement the major Spanish exhibition, El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III, which debuts at the MFA on April 20 and runs through July 27, 2008.)

Antonio López García will highlight the artist’s career from 1955 to the present. The familiar and ordinary of López’s world—the classical themes of landscape, still life, and figure realized through the close examination of his immediate surroundings—comprise this renowned artist’s subject. With painstaking detail and profound adherence to observation, López creates a faithful representation of his humble motifs. His strict dependence upon the truth of his subjects has become legendary—sculptures and paintings have sometimes taken him years to complete—which accounts for the often lengthy creative process for which he is known.

“Antonio López García is considered a national treasure in his native Spain. We are proud to bring the extraordinary works of this contemporary realist and visionary to American audiences,” said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Born in 1936 in Tomelloso (part of the La Mancha area of central Spain), López displayed innate artistic talent as a youth and gained admittance to the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid at the age of 13. In the years after graduation in 1955, López was first associated with “magic realism” and juxtaposed peculiar combinations of images of people and places, resulting in mysterious and haunting compositions. Yet, by the early 1960s, the artist developed what would be his mature, realist period through which he observed his surroundings with increasing intensity, and meticulously translated his view into poetic canvases, drawings, and sculpture. He has received international acclaim throughout the years, and in 2006 was awarded the Premio Velázquez (Velázquez Prize), named after the 17th-century painter (the award aspires to become the arts equivalent of the Cervantes Prize, regarded as the literature Nobel of the Spanish-speaking world).