Antonio López García

Antonio Lopez Garcia is one of Spain's most revered contemporary artists. Bringing his profound visual sensitivity and mastery of light to bear on a range of deliberately quotidian subjects, Lopez Garcia imbues them with an extraordinary and haunting character. In 1993, his paintings and drawings were given a major retrospective at the Reina Sofia, Madrid, while Victor Erice's 1992 documentary about Lopez Garcia, "The Quince Tree of the Sun," received the Critics' Prize at that year's Cannes and top prize at the Chicago Film Festival. Yet Lopez Garcia's work has rarely been exhibited outside his native country. This book, published to accompany the first major exhibition of his art in the United States (in tandem with the MFA's monumental "El Greco to Velazquez" exhibition), offers the first comprehensive overview in English of this extraordinary oeuvre. An essay by curator Cheryl Brutvan discusses Lopez Garcia as a descendant of the great Spanish naturalists, as well as his indebtedness to Surrealism and "magic realism," while individual appreciations of some 50 paintings offer English-speaking readers their first opportunity to appreciate in depth the remarkable poetry and atmospheric density of this major world artist.