Memorandum

The long artistic career of Seville-born Luis Gordillo (1934) reveals a personal eclecticism that blends pop art with informalism and geometry. Irony, the use of color, and technological research into images and their uses reveal the dichotomy between direct, expressive work and controlled, clean, perfectionist execution. Unclassifiable and personal, his work has received important national and international awards.

Luis Gordillo was born in Seville in 1934, the second of eight children. He studied law and music and later decided to become a painter. He attended the School of Fine Arts in Seville for two years. From 1958 to 1960, he lived in Paris, where he studied museums and film archives in depth and, above all, experienced a climate of freedom in life and reading that was difficult to find in Spain at the time. Upon leaving Paris, he entered a crisis and did not paint again until 1963, returning with a pop aesthetic and his famous Cabezas series. From 1970 onwards, after his profound crisis, he began to paint colorful pictures with a new element: irony. In the 1980s, his painting became more abstract and less colorful, but he continued to retain the influence that mechanical techniques such as offset printing, photography, and more recently, the computer, had had on his work since the 1970s, as part of his extensive research into the transformation of images and media.

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