ANTONIO RODRÍGUEZ LUNA

He was a painter from Cordoba who lived in Madrid between 1928 and 1934, a member who participated in the II Salon of the Independent (1930), in some exhibitions of AGAP ( Professional Group of Plastic Artists, since 1931), and in the Society of the Iberian Artists Palace de Charlottenborg, Copenhague, and Gallery Flechtheim, Berlin, both in 1932). In 1933 he staged his first individual exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in Madrid that purchased his work Birds on the Water-Melon Plantation, he took part in the collective exhibition of the Group of Constructive Art and in the First Exhibition of Revolutionary Art and he turned into one of the people in charge of the magazine October, that was directed by Rafael Alberti and María Teresa León. In this period his work found itself in the surrealistic parametres and influenced by vallecan aesthetics.

The politicizing of Rodríguez was unstoppable since the repressive events of the Revolution in Asturias at the end of 1934, so that his activity during the Civil war was not surprising, and it culminated in the album Sixteen Pictures of War (Valencia, 1937) and in numerous magazines of that time. After having been in the French concentration camps in Argelès-sur-mer he succeeded in going to Mexico and startign there a new stage, more melancholic, formal, and abstract.

In between 1941-1943 he was granted a scholarship Guggenheim in New York. Antonio Rodríguez Luna passed that period as an expatriot staging numerous exhibitions ans illustrating various books like To Die After Closing Eyes of  Max Aub (1944). Besides his exhibitions in Spain we should mention the one inaugurated in the gallery Juana Mordó (1976) in Madrid, which catalogue was completed by his friend, the poet Rejano. Nowadays there is Museum of Antonio Rodríguez Luna in Montoro.

Claudio Coello 6 28001 Madrid tel. (34) 91 435 0174 galeria@josedelamano.com