EDUARDO ARROYO

Eduardo Arroyo belongs to a family of liberals of the medium class. He studies journalism and in 1958 he goes to Paris with the purpose of becoming a writer. There he joins the group of artists and intellectuals of his compatriots and he takes to the painting. His first canvases are figurative, among them The Flight of the Butterfly (1960) which is exhibited in the Salon of the Young Painter, and portraits of military men and ecclesiastics which are on his first individual exhibition in the Gallery Levin in Paris (1961).

Tangier Series 27, 1985

In 1963 he displays his canvases in the III Biennial of Paris, being the part of the group L'Abbatoir. His opposition to the regime of Franco is manifested in his paintings that he completed in the same year and displayed in the gallery Biosca in Madrid that was closed soon after its opening. Two years later he took part in the organization of 25 Years in Peace to oppose the XXV anniversary of the regime of Franco. During these years he was busy with the dispute between the political compromise of the art and the vanguard. The series To Live and to Let Die or a Tragic Destiny of Marcel Duchamp (1965) and He Looked Changed (1966). His work becomes an essential part of the Pop movement because it is full of american connotations and narratives with a rich iconographic vocabulary that helps him to criticize the culture, the politics and the society of his time.

At the end of the seventies he works at the theatrical projects with Klaus Gruber. In 1973 he returns to Paris and a year later he travels to Valencia where he is arrested and expelled from Spain. From that time on, his vision becomes that of an expatriate and the themes of the exile dominate in his work. In 1976 the collapse of the regime of Franco makes it possible for him to return to the Peninsula and to begin a new period of his professional life. The recognition of his talent becomes evident when he gets the National Prize of Plastic Art of the Ministry of Culture (1982) and the title of the Caballero of the Arts and Philology granted by the French government and when a number of events connected with his works take place in the National Library of Madrid, in Pompidou Center in Paris and the Guggenheim in New York.

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