Memorandum

The long artistic career of the Sevillian Luis Gordillo (1934) shows a personal eclecticism that fuses from pop to informalism or geometry. Irony, the use of colour and the technological research of the image and its uses, reveal the dilemma between a direct and expressive work and a controlled, clean and perfectionist production. Unclassifiable and personal, his work has received important national and international awards.

Luis Gordillo was born in Seville in 1934, the second son of eight siblings. 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 in depth museums, cinematheque, and above all lived a climate of freedom of life and readings then difficult in Spain. When he left Paris, he went into crisis and did not paint again until 1963, returning within a pop aesthetic, with his famous series Cabezas (Heads). From 1970 onwards, after his deep crisis, he began to paint pictures full of color and with a new element, irony. In the 80's, his painting became more abstract and less colorful, but he still retains the influence that mechanical techniques such as offset, photography or more recently, the computer, have had on his work since the 70's, as part of his extensive research into the transformation of images and the media.

Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts 2007, National Prize for Plastic Arts in 1981, Prize of the Community of Madrid 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, Tomás Francisco Prieto Prize of the Mint in 1999, Premi Ciutat de Barcelona d'Arts Plàstiques in 2000, Aragón-Goya Prize for Painting in 2003 and Gold Medal of the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid in 2004. In 2008 he was awarded the Order of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres de France by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication.