Cheryl Brutvan

Antonio López García is one of Spain’s most revered contemporary artists. Bringing his profound visual sensitivity and mastery of light to bear on a range of deliberately quotidian subjects, López García imbues them with an extraordinary and haunting character. In 1993, his paintings and drawings were given a major retrospective at the Reina Sofía, Madrid, while Victor Erice’s 1992 documentary about López García, The Quince Tree of the Sun, received the Critics’ Prize at that year’s Cannes and top prize at the Chicago Film Festival. Yet López García’s work has rarely been exhibited outside his native country. This book, published to accompany the first major exhibition of his art in the United States (in tandem with the monumental El Greco to Velázquez exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), offers the first comprehensive overview in English of this extraordinary oeuvre. An essay by curator Cheryl Brutvan discusses López García as a descendant of the great Spanish naturalists, as well as his indebtedness to Surrealism and Magic Realism, while individual appreciations of some 50 paintings offer English-speaking readers their first opportunity to appreciate in depth the remarkable poetry and atmospheric density of this major world artist.