Art will not only be this week in halls 7 and 9 of Ifema, on the occasion of the celebration of the 42nd edition of ARCO, which opens this Wednesday and the Three Kings inaugurate on Thursday. We will also see art in the streets of Madrid. This is the case of Antonio López, whose exhibition focused on the childhood It is not in a museum, nor in a gallery, nor in an art fair, but in a department store: 55 pieces of the artist from La Mancha are exhibited, until Sunday, in four shop windows of El Corte Inglés in Preciados. A place that Antonio López knows well, because for years he has been painting, intermittently, from the seventh floor of the center of Callao one of his views of the Gran Vía.
Works by Antonio López, in the windows of El Corte Inglés de Preciados
In them, the artist captures childhood in a pure, white way, making the sculptures a unique project, which he has been working on all his life. There are sculptures of different sizes and made of different materials such as plaster, alabaster, silver and bronze, among others. The works represent the heads of their grandchildren y full-length sculptures of his daughters when they were little, symbolizing through them the different stages of childhood and adolescence. In addition, it includes the sketches initials of these works, which will allow the viewer to better understand the creative process of the artist.
During the opening of the exhibition, the painter assured that he had been greatly impressed “seeing this work of almost all my life, together, so well lit, shown in such a shameless way, as if it were something extremely important, and on that pedestrian street … It has produced me a huge impression, good. She had never done it, now I will do it more times».
Antonio López, next to one of the windows where his sculptures are exhibited
Asked about the future of art, he says that he knows very young people who make paintings that “if you put them in the best place in the world, Prado they did not detract I believe that the good that has been done in our time has been done with effort and courage enormous. There is a lot of bad, but the good is very good, it is a matter of seeing it ».
El Corte Inglés wanted to pay tribute to one of the greatest contemporary artists within the framework of the artistic interventions that it hosts every year in its Preciados windows within the ARCO program, and through which great names of current contemporary art have passed. The theme chosen for this edition by Antonio López is childhood as the beginning of everything, but also as a message of esperanza after the last difficult years that society has faced. All daily worries are eclipsed by the tranquility and calm that the images of children provide us, of the new lives that are beginning.
In 2008, Antonio López completed his first solo public monumental sculpture commission: two large monumental bronze heads three meters high, ‘La Noche’ and ‘El Día’, which are located next to the Atocha station from Madrid.