Antonio López García: Drawings

The Spanish artist Antonio López García is revered worldwide not only for the extreme realism he brings to his paintings and drawings, but because he conveys through this extreme realism a wonderful sensitivity to light, color and space, enabling each to breathe with a tranquility that allows for the encroachments of everyday life. Interior scenes of dining tables, bathroom sinks, toilets, dressers are depicted in sober light that recall Chardin or the intimisme of Vuillard--though López García surpasses even these masters in his ability to make unforgivingly prosaic subject matter, such as a brick wall or a refrigerator, sparkle and throb with mood. The artist's statement that "you work until the whole surface has an expressive intensity equivalent to what you have before you, converted into a pictorial reality" conveys something of the labor he brings to his works: López García is not a prolific artist, and as a result shows rarely (his 2008 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, consolidated his already strong audience in the U.S.). His drawings and paintings are equally esteemed, but until now, the drawings have never been the subject of a monograph. All of the work in this superbly designed publication has been carefully selected by the artist's daughter, Maria; much of it has never been reproduced until now. Including 200 color plates and a moving text by the artist himself, it stands as a powerful testimony to López García's astounding achievement.Antonio López García (born 1936) studied at the School of Art in Madrid in the early 1950s, and quickly became part of a nucleus of realist painters, such as Francisco López Hernández, Amalia Avia and Isabel Quintanilla. López García was the subject of Víctor Erice's 1992 film El Sol del Membrillo (The Quince Tree of the Sun), which closely chronicles the artist's attempts to paint a quince tree.