Exhibition "Luis Gordillo. Tell me who you are"

La Alcalá 31 Hall presents "tell me who are you", an exhibition that brings together an extensive selection of works by Luis Gordillo from the last twenty years and analyzes in depth the most outstanding lines of research from this last period. Two decades in which Gordillo has put painting at the center, with special importance to the constant feedback that exists between it and photography, the collage and drawing, a very characteristic territory of the artist in which the image in process defines internal configurations that build the work.

A field, that of painting, which in this XNUMXst century has freed itself from narrow self-definitions and thinks of the image as something aquatic, as things that go away and are lost, like water goes between the hands. In this sense, the works in this exhibition are understood as containers whose function is to give an external form to what flows, to what ends. Although everything in his last painting is about to begin.

This exhibition is linked to the exhibition that the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía dedicated to him in 2007, the year in which the artist was awarded the Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts. Thus, "tell me who you are" it begins with the piece that closed that exhibition to later delve into the artistic corpus that has been configuring since then. With the hectic and active pulse that transmits the energy of an artist who at 89 is still active and with a clear influence on new generations, the Sala Alcalá 31 organizes the largest retrospective of his work in Madrid since then. 

In the last two decades, his way of painting remains the same: the artist is always in the painting but not always painting. Luis Gordillo has had a certain aversion to placing himself within a single channel, not only in relation to a theoretical or concept question, but rather to a question of character, way of being and, above all, way of feeling. From this constant reflection, experimentation is born, the key word of this project. The artist puts painting at the center, placing the focus on the symbiosis that exists between it and photography, collage and drawing, increasingly prolific fields of escape in his artistic work. Although, above all, what he proposes in this exhibition is a celebration of a unique creative capacity, that of an artist who, at 89 years old, is still active and has a clear influence on new generations.

Luis Gordillo He was born in Seville in 1934, the second son of eight siblings. He studies law and music and later decides to be a painter. He attended the Seville School of Fine Arts for two years. From 1958 to 1960 he lived in Paris where he thoroughly studied museums, cinematheques, and above all lived a climate of freedom of life and reading that was then difficult in Spain. Upon leaving Paris, he entered into a crisis and did not paint again until 1963, returning to a pop aesthetic with his famous series Cabezas. Starting in 1970, he began to paint pictures full of color and with a new element: irony. In the 80s, his painting became more abstract and less colourful, but he continued to preserve the influence that mechanical techniques such as offset, photography or, more recently, the computer, as part of his extensive research on the transformation of images and the media.

Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts 2007, National Prize for Plastic Arts in 1981, Community of Madrid Prize for Plastic Creation and the Andalusian Prize for Plastic Arts in 1991, CEOE Prize for Plastic Arts in 1992, Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts in 1996, the Tomás Francisco Prieto Award from the Casa de la Moneda in 1999, the Ciutat de Barcelona Award for Plastic Arts in 2000, the Aragón-Goya Painting Award in 2003 and the Gold Medal from the Círculo de Bellas Artes of Madrid in 2004. He has been distinguished in 2008 with the Order of Knight of Arts and Letters of France by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication.