Antonio López: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, 28 June-25 September 2011, Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao, 10 October-22 January 2012

Antonio López--also known as Antonio López García--is hyper-realism's greatest living exponent, and one of the finest painters of the past hundred years. Published on the occasion of the artist's landmark exhibition at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, this generous overview constitutes a self-portrait of a genuine icon of contemporary painting. It spans the years from 1953 to the present, placing an emphasis on works made after 1993 (the year of the artist's last retrospective exhibition in Spain, at the Reina Sofia Museum). These more recent pieces include masterworks such as "View of Madrid from the Vallecas Fire Tower" (1990-2006) and the monumental heads "Day," "Night" and "Woman, Coslada" (2010). The artist himself has selected the works and structured their presentation here into eight thematic groupings: "Memory," "Surroundings," "Madrid," "Gran Vía," "Tree," "Nude," "Characters" and "Interiors." Full-color reproductions are complemented by a wealth of archival documentary photographs of the artist at work.
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.