EDUARDO ARROYO
Spanish, 1937 - 2018
TOUTE LA VILLE EN PARLE
signed "ARROYO 82" (lower centre)
signed, dated and titled "ARROYO / 1982 / TOUTE LA VILLE EN PARLE" (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
57-1/2 x 9-7/8 inches (146 x 25 cm.)
unframed
PROVENANCE
Galerie Editions Karl Flinker
Leonard Hutton Galleries
Corporate Collection Ahlers AG, Herford
Private Collection, Germany
EXHIBITED
New York, Leonard Hutton Galleries, "EDUARDO ARROYO", March 24-May 26 1983, Catalogue No. 36
Eduardo Arroyo (Madrid, February 26 1937 - Madrid, October 14 2018). He was born on Argensola Street in Madrid to a family of Leonese origin. He studied journalism, graduating in 1957. A year later, he moved to Paris with the idea of pursuing a career as a writer and there he contacted artists and intellectuals, many of them from exile after the Civil War. In addition to his interest in writing, his attraction to art began to develop in Paris.
His first approaches to fine arts were through caricature, from which he jumped to painting and, later, to sculpture. In the French capital, in addition to his activity as a creator, he was active in the fight against the Franco regime, which led to his being expelled from Spain in 1974 and the loss of his passport until two years later.
From 1960 is his work The Run of the Butterfly, which he presented at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture in Paris and, a year later, he held his first individual exhibition at the Parisian gallery Lèvin in which the works presented collect an iconography with the one who tried to denounce the Spanish political system.
In 1963 he exhibited at the III Paris Biennale and at the Biosca gallery in Madrid, an exhibition, the latter of which opened without his presence and which was closed by censorship a few days later.
His work began to be known in Spain, especially in the 1980s. In 1982, the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris dedicated a large retrospective to him and that same year he was awarded the National Prize for Plastic Arts in Spain.
His work, of a marked figurative nature, is determined by a high political and social content.
This figuration that appears in Arroyo's work not only in painting, but also in his sculptures, is the heir of a pre-existing iconography, probably the result of his work as an illustrator. The use of “borrowed” images perhaps responds to his attempts to demystify and, at the same time, pay homage to the historical avant-garde and also means a penultimate breath for pop art. There are, thus, references to great masters such as Marcel Duchamp (Dress Going Down the Stairs) or Joan Miró (Miró Remade series).
Surrealism is also another of the constants in his works in which it is mixed with stereotypical touches of Spanish folklore (Carmen Amaya fries sardines at the Waldorf Astoria). Another of the invariables in his work is pop art and advertising icons (series of sculptures on the Tío Pepe bottle), heirs of his work in illustration. Sculpture is another of his facets in which, as in painting, Arroyo appropriates an easily recognizable iconography. These images are transformed, mixed, decontextualized or distorted to convey a different message to the viewer, a new perspective, halfway between surrealism and pop. His series about bees or bulls are well-known, in which a folkloric or anthropological component is added to the previous image, sometimes trying to ridicule Spanish clichés.
Arroyo also created sets: specifically, he made several works for the Italian director Klaus Michael Grüber, among which stands out the creation, in 1999, of a new image for Wagner's opera, Tristan und Isolde, presented at the Salzburg Festival. In 1982 he made, for the director José Luis Gómez, the sets for the latter's version of Calderón's play Life is a Dream.
Book illustration and printmaking—he won the National Graphic Art Prize in 2007—complete his artistic creation.
His work is today distributed among important museums and individuals, highlighting the collections held by institutions such as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Center Pompidou in Paris or the Valencian Institute of Modern Art.