Jorge Castillo

"Hommage a Picasso, " Etching by Jorge Castillo, 1973

1973

Jorge Castillo, painter and sculptor, was born on June 16, 1933, in Pontevedra. Only one year after his birth his family emigrated to Argentina for political reasons. Castillo spent his childhood and youth in Buenos Aires. He tried to migrate to Paris, but due to a lack of economic resources, he was established in Spain. He soon came into contact with the art critic José María Moreno Galván, who admired his work and introduced him to the Madrid artistic circles. In 1958, he started selling his drawings at the gallery in Biosca and the painter Antonio Saura bought several of them. The following year, he exhibited his works on paper and watercolors at the Altamira Fine Art gallery in Madrid. In 1960, he was selected for the São Paulo Art Biennial in Brazil. Thereafter, he exhibited his work internationally in galleries and museums in New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, Paris, Lisbon, Turin, Hanover, Dusseldorf and Geneva. He has participated in the Venice Biennale in 1964 and 1976 and 1970, performed a solo exhibition at the Nationalgalerie Berlin, the first major exhibition in a museum. In 1964, Castillo won the International Drawing Prize in Darmstadt, Germany and 1975, Darmstadt Prize for Painting. Works of Jorge Castillo are at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne, the Museu Fundación Juan March, the National Galleries in Edinburgh and Berlin, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Kunsthalle Bremen, the Albertina Museum Vienna, the National Library of Spain and the Guggenheim in New York. Since the early 1980s, Castillo has lived in New York, where he was commissioned to create public sculptures in La Coruña, Messina and Barcelona.