This retrospective show presented the first comprehensive selection of the work of Luis Gordillo in all its facets, including paintings, drawings, photographs and collages produced over the last forty years. The exhibition emphasised the artist’s process-based approach and highlighted the importance of concepts like series and repetition in his work. Gordillo maintains that an image that is constantly reproduced never attains a definitive status.

Luis Gordillo is an unusual artist in the Spanish context. He has traditionally been linked to the Madrid realists of the seventies and the return to painting phenomenon in the eighties, a classification that ignores the influence of post-war European Informalism on his work, as well as the personal re-working of Pop Art that he embarked on in the sixties.

Profoundly interested in psychoanalysis, Gordillo gives his pictorial work a psychotherapeutic dimension that ties into a certain spirit of tragic and existentialist thought. The artist has described his work as “a need to flee, to sublimate, to exorcise anguish, to not feel logical in the world.”

www.macba.cat/en/exhibitions/superyo-congelado-2