Antonio López García: Paintings and Sculpture

The Spanish painter, draughtsman and sculptor Antonio Lopez Garcia is so widely celebrated for the staggering exactitude of his painterly realism that it's sometimes easy to neglect the magical, delicate atmospheres he conjures through his technical abilities. His paintings of what in anyone else's hands would seem the blandest subject matter imaginable--a blank wall, a coat hook, a kitchen sink, the interior of a refrigerator--teem with an infused, loving scrutiny that betrays the months and years of labor the artist devotes to each work. "Reality has a highly resonant physical appearance that twentieth-century man perceives from different angles to those of other ages," he once told an interviewer. Likewise, his portrait sculptures attain an almost terrifying verisimilitude, the eyes appearing ever on the verge of flickering into life and returning the viewer's gaze. In 2010, D.A.P. published the definitive monograph on Lopez Garcia's drawings. In this new volume we at last have the definitive monograph on the artist's paintings and sculptures. Carefully overseen by Lopez Garcia in its production, this companion volume includes 200 full-color reproductions, and a short text by the artist. Antonio Lopez Garcia was born in Tomelloso, in the heart of Spain, a few months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. He studied at the School of Art in Madrid in the early 1950s, where he soon proved himself a brilliant student, and quickly became part of a nucleus of realist painters, such as Francisco Lopez Hernandez, Amalia Avia and Isabel Quintanilla. Lopez Garcia was the subject of Victor 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.