Antonio López García: Paintings and Sculpture

The Spanish painter, draughtsman and sculptor Antonio López García 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 López García's drawings. In this new volume we at last have the definitive monograph on the artist's paintings and sculptures. Carefully overseen by López García in its production, this companion volume includes 200 full-color reproductions.
Antonio López García 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 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.