Eduardo Arroyo

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Eduardo Arroyo Rodríguez (born February 26, 1937 in Madrid ; † October 14, 2018 there ) was a Spanish painter , sculptor and graphic artist . He was also active as a journalist , writer , set designer and costume designer .

Life

Early years in Madrid and Paris

Eduardo Arroyo initially worked as a journalist in Madrid, but left Spain in 1958 because of his fundamental contempt for the Francisco Franco regime ( Arroyo later referred to himself as a "whore" to Salvador Dalí, who was resigned to it in his old days ). He settled in Paris and turned to painting as an autodidact. In 1960 three freely financed study trips to Italy followed . In 1963 he became a member of the young artists' association “Salon de la Jeune Peinture” and had contact with Gérald Gissiot-Talabot , Antonio Recalcati , Francis Biras , Gilles Aillaud and the Spanish old master Joan Miró . In 1963, his exhibition at the Biosca gallery in Madrid was initially censored for political reasons and finally closed. In 1964 he achieved his breakthrough as part of a first important exhibition, followed by over 20 years of great critical success as a painter with high esteem on the art market.

Moved to Italy and returned to Paris

In 1968 he moved to Milan and in 1969 the successful artistic collaboration with the artistic director Klaus Michael Grüber began there . Arroyo designed the sets for his production Off Limits by Arthur Adamov in the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, took on the design of Alban Berg's opera Woyzeck at the Bremen Opera and Bertolt Brecht's In the Thicket of Cities in Frankfurt am Main . In 1971 he made in New York acquaintance with Saul Steinberg . In 1973 he returned to Paris and had a studio in “La Ruche”. In Paris he met the leading gallery owner Karl Flinker . In 1974 he was appointed a member of the jury at the Venice Biennale and furnished stage sets for pieces that Klaus Michael Grüber staged in Berlin , Chaillot and Paris.

Expulsion from Spain

Eduardo Arroyo was imprisoned in Valencia in 1974 and expelled from Spain. He lost his Spanish citizenship but was recognized as a political refugee in France . From 1975 to 1976 Arroyo spent a DAAD scholarship in West Berlin .

Return to Spain

In 1976 Arroyo returned to Spain after Franco's death and was officially honored with a major retrospective . He got his Spanish citizenship back. Now he has also taken over the stage decorations for productions by Klaus Michael Grüber such as El arquitecto y el emperador de Asiria by Fernando Arrabal in Barcelona . In 1977 Eduardo Arroyo took part in Documenta 6 in Kassel in the drawing department . In 1983 Eduardo Arroyo was awarded the Grand National Prize for Painting in Spain. Arroyo's play Bantam was premiered in 1986 with great success at the Bavarian State Theater ( Residenztheater ) in Munich by his friends Grüber - for the direction - and Aillaud and Antonio Recalcati - for the stage design and costumes . In 1995 Arroyo represented Spain together with the sculptor Andreu Alfaro at the 46th Venice Biennale .

Works

Picturesque work

Stylistically, Arroyo's mostly ironic, colorful works are at the crossroads between the currents of nouvelle figuration or figuration narrative and pop art . Characteristic for his representations is the general absence of spatial depth and the flattening of the perspective.

After the first expressionistically oriented beginnings, Arroyo came to a simplified representation with elements of montage. In his pictures he dealt with political conditions in his homeland after the Spanish Civil War. His work was based on actual art history images and photos. He revised these and used them for his own image statements. He saw painting as a means of political debate. In Paris his first series of pictures, which he exhibited in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture , caused a sensation and led to a scandal. This scandal made him internationally known. His works are now characterized by a content statement and captured with crystal-clear, realistic precision of form. He was vehemently directed against the “experimental art of the avant-garde”, especially against Marcel Duchamp, and together with Aillaud and Recalcati designed the 1965 exhibition “Live and let die. Or the tragic end of Marcel Duchamp ”. Arroyo found himself in a group of like-minded colleagues for whom painting was not an end in itself, but rather to visualize a moral attitude. Within this dispute, Arroyo also dealt with Miró. The cycle Miró refait on les malheurs de la coexistence was created in 1969 , in which he detached his work from its historical context and relocated it to the present. The work of the 1960s illustrated his preoccupation with art history. Not only was modernity questioned like that of Pop Art and its work critically examined, the intentions of earlier artists such as Diego Velázquez , David and Goya are taken up in a satirical and polemical way through apparent quotations of their works and experience a change in their meaning, the Arroyo uses it for its own statements.

He then began a series of pictures about boxing, which plays a large role in Arroyo's life. He deliberately wanted to integrate himself into surrealism in Paris. Around 1969 there was a larger series of works dedicated to Winston Churchill . Arroyo sees Churchill as the embodiment of the irreconcilable antithesis of art and politics and starts here with his criticism. After Franco's death in Spain, these topics lose their relevance. In the 1970s, Arroyo turned to portraiture . There arise u. a. Portraits by Aldo Mondino . What is remarkable is Arroyo's attempt to give the two-dimensional image the third dimension, juxtaposing reality and fiction. In the mid-1970s, the agitational images stepped back in favor of a further reflection of signs and reality in his work. The most remarkable example of this phase is the cycle of blind painters (Parmi les peintres). While he mostly used templates for the earlier pictures, templates only play a subordinate role. Collages are created from glued, colored sandpaper. These are again in the tradition of the Duchamp and Miró cycles, but have achieved a new quality . Arroyo goes against the self-satisfied insistence on firmly established positions and the existential alienation from reality. His work always remains committed to the intellectual environment of the big cities.

Stage sets

Arroyo became known to a wide audience through his numerous work as a set designer and partly also as a costume designer. In this regard, he has worked since 1969 mainly with the director Klaus Michael Grüber , who encouraged him to do this. Arroyo designed stages a. a. for the Piccolo Teatro in Milan , the Paris Opera (1976 Richard Wagner's Die Walküre ), the Schaubühne on Lehniner Platz in Berlin or the Salzburg Festival ( Leoš Janáček's Z mrtveho domu in 1992 ).

Awards

Publicly owned works

Solo exhibitions

  • 1961: Claude Lévin Gallery, Paris.
  • 1963: Galerie Biosca (exhibition censored and closed), Madrid.
  • 1967: Galleria Il Fante de Spade (Miró cycle), Rome.
  • 1969: Galerie Withofs (Churchill cycle), Brussels.
  • 1977: Galerie Maeght (cat.), Brussels.
  • 1980: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. (Blind painters; catalog with list of exhibits and bibliographies 1970–80).
  • 1982: Center Pompidou, Paris.
  • 1982: Salas Picasso (cat.), Madrid.
  • 1984: Guggenheim Museum, New York.
  • 1984: Galerie Anton Meier (cat.), Geneva.
  • 1987: Museum for Art and Cultural History, Dortmund. (Theater, boxing, figuration; cat.)
  • 1988: Galerie Anton Meier, Geneva.
  • 1988: Michael Hasenclever Gallery, Munich. (Sculptures, ceramics, works on paper).
  • 1994: Anton Meier Gallery, Geneva.

Group exhibitions

  • 1960 Salon de la Jeune Peinture, Paris

Literature by Arroyo (selection)

  • "Panama". The life of the boxer Al Brown . Biography. From the Franz. By Anna Kamp. Ullstein 1987
  • Sardines in oil . Fischer 1996

Literature on Arroyo

  • JL Chalumeau: Introduction à l'art d'aujourd'hui, Paris 1971
  • A. Second: Commitment and quote, in: Malerwelt ab 1900, M. 1982, pp. 291–302.
  • P. Astier: Arroya, Paris 1982
  • Julian Rios in: Catalog Galerie Anton Meier, Geneva, 1984
  • Vingt-cinq ans d'art en France 1960–1985, Paris 1986, p. 109 ff.
  • Catalog for documenta 6: Volume 1: Painting, sculpture / environment, performance; Volume 2: photography, film, video; Volume 3: Hand drawings, utopian design, books; Kassel 1977 ISBN 3-920453-00-X

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ List of scholarship holders on the website of the DAAD's Berlin Artists' Program . (Retrieved January 23, 2010.)
  2. ↑ Martínez Novillo, Álvaro (1983). Los Premios Nacionales de Artes Plásticas Cuenta y Razón, n ° 12. Julio-agosto de 1983. Consultado el 2007-11-25.
personal data
SURNAME Arroyo, Eduardo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish painter, printmaker and author
DATE OF BIRTH February 26, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Madrid
DATE OF DEATH October 14, 2018
Place of death Madrid