Luis Gordillo

The Directors of Marlborough Gallery are pleased to announce that an exhibition of recent paintings by Luis Gordillo will open at Marlborough Chelsea, 545 West 25th Street, on March 26 and continue through April 25, 2009. Born in Seville, Gordillo is one of the most influential figures in Spanish art during the last 40 years. This will be the artist's first show in Chelsea and his first in New York since his exhibition at Marlborough Gallery in 1992.

The exhibition in centered on three large polyptychs that were created by uniting independently painted panels into a single work: Lee Friedlander in the Sixties, 2008 (acrylic on canvas, 5 panels, 86.6 x 198.4 in., 220 x 504 cm), Garry Winogrand in the Sixties, 2008 (acrylic on canvas, 7 panels, 86.6 x 198.4 in., 220 x 504 cm) and Diane Arbus in the Sixties, 2008 (acrylic on canvas, 4 panels, 86.6 x 198.4 in., 220 x 504 cm). These paintings are riotous, multicolored abstractions, with overlapping geometrical shapes, connected cells and duplications, each segmented into horizontal bands, sequences of painted moments colliding together.

Critic and curator David Pagel discusses this series in his essay for the catalogue:

Like Johns, Richter, Polke, and Hockney, Gordillo came to prominence at a time fraught with controversy, when the status quo was crumbling and the countercultural movement and the sexual revolution were taking the United States and Europe by storm. His three huge, multi-panel paintings in this exhibition acknowledge the importance of that era by paying homage to three American photographers, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand, whose point-blank, in-the-street works captured the tenor of their times and fueled their fires: the strangeness, the craziness, and the sense that anything was possible, provided you did it yourself (and didn't trust anyone over 40). Along with Johns, Richter, Polke, and Hockney, Gordillo emerged at the moment when Existentialism and Freudian psychology were in decline, replaced by Structural Anthropology, Structural Linguistics, and, eventually, Post-Structuralism and the various Post-Modernisms it spawned. His works, like theirs, abandoned the past's fascination with interiority, subjectivity, and sentimentality in favor of addressing the shared social space of public life, its sign systems, and the conventions and habits that unite and divide people all over the world.

The exhibition will also feature a number of mixed media works comprised of painted and collaged serigraphs, in which abstract fields and figurative elements are combined. In addition, Gordillo will show a series of monotypes, each measuring 39 ¼ x 27 ½ inches (100 x 70 cm). These works are representative of Gordillo's interest in multiplicity, which can be interpreted not just as the artist's effort to undermine the pictorial tradition of the unique object, but also refers to the multiplicity of reality and even to the multiplicity of the artist's own interior identity.

Luis Gordillo was born in Seville in 1934, the second of eight siblings. He studied law and music before committing to painting. He studied for two years at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Seville. From 1958 to 1960 he lived in Paris where he studied in museums, movie houses and, above all, enjoyed a climate of intellectual freedom very difficult to find in Spain at that time. He painted within the confines of Informalism, especially in black over white following the parameters set by Michaux, Dubuffet, Wols, Tàpies, etc. When Gordillo left Paris, his artistic concept, even his artistic vocation, entered a crisis. When he began painting again in 1963, he did so within a Pop framework of which he became one of Spain's pioneers, creating a well-received series entitled Cabezas, particularly that of 1965. After this, a new interest in geometry was felt in his work, concluding an initial basic synthesis of his style.

In 1970, after a long crisis during which Gordillo focused solely on drawing, he began to paint again with a new focus on color, including a new element: irony. Additionally, he delved into a wide investigation of new technology, specifically image transformation and photographic creation. During this period of creative investigation he had two very important exhibitions, at the Galería Maeght in Barcelona (1976) and at the Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao (1981).

In the 1980s, Gordillo's painting changed, becoming more abstract, less colorful, a bridge to his Informalist period. It is during this moment that he developed a concept that he refers to as “situación meándrica,” a form of automatism in which he paints a gray blotch, almost linear and monochromatic, that extends horizontally in the painting. This approach continues to be one of his basic concepts of work today but not the only one. One must take into account that one of his basic characteristics is a constant dynamic of creative change; throughout his career Gordillo has lived with the constant dilemma between a very direct and expressive way of working and on the other hand an approach that is very clean, perfectionist and controlled in which from the 1970s onwards he has used mechanic techniques such as offset printing, photography and, recently, the computer.

Gordillo has received numerous awards for his artistic achievement, including Spain's highest honor, El Premio Velázquez a las Artes Plásticas and France's Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres, both in 2007. Gordillo's work has been the subject of over one hundred solo exhibitions since his debut in 1959. His most recent public exhibitions include an important retrospective at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, that traveled to Kunstmuseum Bonn in 2008. Other important solo exhibitions include those held at Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Bilbao; Biblioteca Nacional, Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid; Pabellón Mudéjar, Seville; Institut Valencìa d'Art Modern, Valencia; Meadows Museum, Dallas; Museum Folkwang, Essen; and Instituto Cervantes, Paris, among many others.

Gordillo's work is in the collections of numerous public institutions, including Fundación Juan March, Madrid; Fundación La Caixa, Caja Madrid; Institut Valencìa d'Art Modern, Centre Julio Gonzalez, Valencia; Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Bilbao; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid and Museum Folkwang, Essen.

An illustrated catalogue will be available at the time of the exhibition.