BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • … · gle painting based on La Ronde de...

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The Fondation Maeght presents a thematic exhibition of works produced since 1964, made up of well-known paintings as well as those never before seen including a series of paintings created especially for this exhibition. There are also many drawings and a collection of sculptures. The arrangement of the works features small theaters around such paintings as the Agneau Mystique or Paradis des mouches, kingdom of the vanities. “I am just a painter who does a lot of things, who goes from writing to poetry, from sculpture to sce- nography, to get back to painting, and to paint with more force.” Eduardo Arroyo, painter, illustrator, sculptor, looks for an appropriate language for each situation. He has remarkable attention to detail, incredible technical skill and a fantasy that is vital. His deliberate eclecticism drives him to use all the materials that are capable of translating his world. He works with graphic design, printmaking, sculpture as well as ceramic or the assembly of various materials to return to oils and canvas with a constantly renewed energy. Painting is somehow literary; and it is in this sense that I work on themes. There is a beginning, an end, characters, and the ambiguity specific to novels. It is therefore a story, as if I had written about fifteen novels... , explains Eduardo Arroyo. EDUARDO ARROYO Dans le respect des traditions July 1 - November 19, 2017 Exhibition guide

Transcript of BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • … · gle painting based on La Ronde de...

Page 1: BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • … · gle painting based on La Ronde de nuit by Rembrandt and creates his first reliefs in rubber. January 1977 First solo

1937Birth of Eduardo Arroyo in Madrid on Feb-ruary 26, during the Spanish Civil War. After primary and secondary studies at the Lycée français and then at the Instituto de Nuestra Señora de la Almudena, he enters Journal-ism School.

1958Goes into exile in Paris. He arrives there with the intention of being a journalist, but soon decides to paint.

1959Meets gallerist Georges Detais.

1960Participates in the Salon de la jeune pein-ture, refuses artistic dogmas as much as arbitrary politics.

1963 Presents L’abattoir at the third Paris Bien-nial conceived in collaboration with Biass, Brusse, Camacho, Pinoncelli and Zlotykam-ien.

1965Becomes one of the main actors of the “Narrative Figuration” movement after his participation in the exhibition of the same name in October 1965. Exhibition presented at the Creuze gallery in Paris and organized by critic Gérald Gassiot-Talabots where the collective work (a series of eight paintings) Vivre et laisser mourir ou la fin tragique de Marcel Duchamp by Allaud, Arroyo and Re-calcati creates a scandal.

1967March: Exhibition “Aillaud, Arroyo, Recalcati” at the Galleria Mendoza, Caracas. The three artists travel to Venezuela, Mexico and New York.April: Participates in the exhibition “Bande dessinée et figuration narrative” held at the Musée des Arts Décoratif, Paris.September: 5th Paris Biennial.November: Exhibition, «Eduardo Arroyo, Miró refait ou les malheurs de la coexistence» at the Galleria Il Fante di Spada, Rome.

1968May: Participates in the May 1968 demon-strations in Paris and produces political posters in the “atelier populaire” at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.July: Settles in Milan.

1969Creates the stage sets for Offlimits present-

ed at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan. It is the first of a long series of collaborations with the director Klaus Michael Grüber.December: Exhibition, “Sur le thème de Churchill peintre” at the Galerie Withofs, Brussels.

1970Lives in Rome until September.October: Exhibition, “30 anni dopo” present-ed at the Galleria Arte Borgogna in Milan on Franco’s Spain and in 1971 at the Arc, Paris and at the Frankfurter Kunstverein.

1971Voyage to New York. Meets Saül Steinberg.

1973Meets Karl Flinker.Returns to Paris and sets up at La Ruche.Release of Il poi viene prima (Milan: Feltr-inelli) published in French in 1974 under the title Trente-cinq ans après (Christian Bourgois).February: Exhibition “Opere operette” at the Galleria Arte Borgogna, Milan where the boxer series called La forza del destino is presented.

October 1974 Arrested in Spain where he was preparing the Venice Biennale. Deported in November. France grants him political refugee status.

1975-76Moves to West Berlin at the invitation of DAAD, the Academy of Fine Arts, for a nine-month residence. Works on one sin-gle painting based on La Ronde de nuit by Rembrandt and creates his first reliefs in rubber.

January 1977 First solo exhibition in Spain since 1963, Galerie Maeght, Barcelona.

April 1977 «Mythologies quotidiennes II», group exhi-bition at the A.R.C., Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris.

June 1978Participates in Documenta 6 in Kassel.

1980“Ramoneurs”, solo exhibition at the Galerie Maeght, Zürich.

1982Retrospective “Eduardo Arroyo, 1962-1982, 20 years of painting,” Salas Ruiz Pi-casso, Madrid; Centre Georges Pompidou,

Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris. Arroyo has never given up on writing. He is the author of the Panama Al Brown biog-raphy which is extension of his interest in boxing, as is manifest in his painting.

1984Solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Muse-um, New York.

1986Premiere of his play Bantam at the Residenz Theater in Berlin, directed by K.M. Grüber.Exhibition in Madrid, Fundación Santillana where the Madrid-Paris-Madrid series is presented.

1988May: Exhibition “Berlin, Tangier, Marseilles” at the Musée Cantini, Marseille.October: Exhibition “Arroyo Malakoff” at the Galerie de France, Paris, where the Carmen Amaya series is presented.

1989Publication of Sardines à l’huile (by Plon), an anthology of texts by Arroyo.

1993“Grandeur nature” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao where only large scale paint-ings are exhibited.

1995Represents Spain along with sculptor An-dreu Alfaro at the 46th Venice Biennale.

1997Along with his paintings devoted to boxing, the Olympic Museum in Lausanne exhibits Suite Senefelder and Co, a tribute to Aloys Senefelder made up of 102 prints created from old abandoned lithographic stones from several European workshops.

1998The Museo Nacional Centro Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid organizes the first retrospective exhibition of his work in Spain.

1999Galerie Louis Carré & Cie presents “Chap-itres”, its first exhibition of Eduardo Arroyo’s work which includes Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien and Le Jour que Richard Lind-ner est mort. Creates the sets for Tristan & Isolde, directed by K.M. Gruber, Salzburg Festival.

2003Second exhibition at the Galerie Louis Car-ré & Cie presenting painted canvases. The

travelling exhibition of Spanish art abroad begins showing his work in Hungary and throughout 2004 in Romania, Russia and Luxembourg.

2004His book Dans des cimetières sans gloire – Goya, Benjamin, Byron-boxeur, which has been published in French by the Grasset publishing house.Writing and drawing come together for Edu-ardo Arroyo. He illustrates writings which interest him such as “Oraisons funèbres” by André Malraux, the works of Juan Goyti-solo, Ulysses by James Joyce and the Bible in two volumes with 200 illustrations, pub-lished by Círculo de Lectores.

2005-2006The Galerie Louis Carré & Cie presents a selection of drawings from 45 years of work that once again demonstrates the effec-tiveness of his technique. That same year, the Cervantes Institute organizes a traveling exhibition until 2006 in four of its European centers, 50 portraits of writers created with different techniques.Since 1969, Arroyo has continued to work on set design, especially with Klaus Michael Grüber. In 2005, they work on the revival of ”De la maison des morts” by Leos Janácek at the Opera Bastille in Paris and at the Te-atro Real in Madrid, “Doktor Faust” by Buso-ni at the Opernhaus in Zürich in 2006, while that same year, they stage Boris Godunov by Mussorgsky at La Monnaie Theater in Brussels, then in Strasbourg, Mulhouse and Madrid the following year.

2007Exhibition «Correspondances» at the Galerie Louis Carré & Cie showing paintings that make up a vibrant tribute to Fernand Léger.

2008IVAM Valencia exhibition of large scale can-vases and sculptures, mainly of stone and iron, created over the last decade.

2009-2010Taurus Madrid and Círculo de Lectores Barcelona publish “Minuta de un testamen-to”, autobiographical memoirs mixed with observations, comments and sometimes nostalgic, often sarcastic anecdotes which target conventions and other conformism of our contemporary society, especially the pervasive and stifling cultural bureaucracy

which Arroyo treats with his most caustic drawings. The French translation of this literary testament of autobiographical wan-derings was published in 2010 by Editions Grasset under the title “Minutes d’un tes-tament”.

2012 Together with the exhibition “Bazar” show-ing illustrated books, scenographic objects, limited editions and unique works, the Cír-culo de Bellas Artes in Madrid produces a 24-hour black and white film called “Ex-posición individual” showing a long dia-logue filmed between the artist and Alberto Anaut, founder of the PHotoEspaña pho-tography festival. The polyptych from the Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, the oil paint-ing by Van Eyck brothers in the first half of the fifteenth century, speaks so strongly to Eduardo Arroyo that he interprets the altar-piece L’Adoration de l’agneau mystique in graphite pencil on sheets of paper with the exact same dimensions of the original ten wooden panels. Made between 2008 and 2009, this transposition in black and white was exhibited in Barcelona and the Muse-um of Fine Arts in Besançon. In July-Sep-tember 2012 it is shown at the Prado mu-seum which presents it in a room recreating the atmosphere of a chapel and accompa-nied by La Fontaine de la grâce from the Van Eyck school as another contemporary counterpoint to the polyptych. This unique work was the subject of a book co-edited by Maeght publishers and the Prado. Eduardo Arroyo clearly asserts his obses-sion for drawing and the place he gives it feeds as much his painting as it does all of his work on paper.He then works with digital print at Bordas Studio where in 2012 he produces the sec-ond volume of “Dictionnaire impossible”. It differs from the first in its technique and its size as well as the number of definitions (In 1997, Eduardo Arroyo makes a series of lithographies for the first fifty entries for the Larousse dictionary).

2013In February and June, the Fundación Juan March in Palma de Mallorca and the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca pres-ent large sculptures “tattooed” in ceramic started in 2010 as well as portraits paint-ed in oil and photographic collages coming

from the long encounter Eduardo Arroyo has with this medium. The exhibition is called “Eduardo Arroyo: Retratos y retratos”.Recalling Eduardo Arroyo strong interest for drawing, Galeria Álvaro Alcázar in Madrid presents, in November 2013, an anthologi-cal exhibition of color pencils on paper.

2014Exhibition at the Galerie Louis Carré & Cie. Arroyo says, “Painting speaks. With some thirty paintings created over the two years before this ninth exhibition in the Parisian gallery, the perpetual back and forth between Paris and Ma-drid, the memories and far away looks resurface.”Exhibition of a selection of portraits, 30 etchings and lithographs from 1990 to 2000: “Rastros / Rostros en la obra gráfica Eduardo Arroyo” at the Cervantes Institute in Tokyo.For its re-opening, the Musée Estrine in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence inaugurated its new spaces by dedicating its first exhi-bition to Eduardo Arroyo, called “La Nuit espagnole”, in a tribute to the well-known work by Francis Picabia.

2015«La force du destin» Hôtel des Arts, Toulon, retraces his entire career since the 1960sEduardo Arroyo and Fabienne Di Rocco or-ganize an exhibition on the relationship be-tween literature and painting, “L’atelier de Saint Jérôme” at Casa del Lector, Matadero Madrid.

2016Exhibition»La Suite Senefelder & Co de Eduardo Arroyo visita el despacho de Ramón Gómez de la Serna,» Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Sala Despacho Ramón de Gómez de la Serna, Madrid. Comprehensive exhibition of the series, 102 prints made from 1993 to 1996 dedicated to Aloys Senefelder the inventor of lithography.

2017For the year of the artist’s 80th birthday, the Fondation Maeght presents “Dans le respect des traditions,” a thematic exhibi-tion of works produced since 1964 includ-ing well-known paintings as well as those never before seen and a series of paintings created especially for this exhibition.

The Fondation Maeght presents a thematic exhibition of works produced since 1964, made up of well-known paintings as well as those never before seen including a series of paintings created especially for this exhibition. There are also many drawings and a collection of sculptures. The arrangement of the works features small theaters around such paintings as the Agneau Mystique or Paradis des mouches, kingdom of the vanities.

“I am just a painter who does a lot of things, who goes from writing to poetry, from sculpture to sce-nography, to get back to painting, and to paint with more force.”

Eduardo Arroyo, painter, illustrator, sculptor, looks for an appropriate language for each situation. He has remarkable attention to detail, incredible technical skill and a fantasy that is vital. His deliberate eclecticism drives him to use all the materials that are capable of translating his world. He works with graphic design, printmaking, sculpture as well as ceramic or the assembly of various materials to return to oils and canvas with a constantly renewed energy.

“Painting is somehow literary; and it is in this sense that I work on themes. There is a beginning, an end, characters, and the ambiguity specific to novels. It is therefore a story, as if I had written about fifteen novels... “, explains Eduardo Arroyo.

EDUARDO ARROYO Dans le respect des traditions

July 1 - November 19, 2017Exhibition guide

• BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY •

Page 2: BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • … · gle painting based on La Ronde de nuit by Rembrandt and creates his first reliefs in rubber. January 1977 First solo

HAUNTING SPAIN(Braque Room)Eduardo Arroyo was born in Madrid in 1937 and is a child of the Spanish Civil War. The specter of what Spain would be until Franco’s death, his “haunting Spain”, has a recurring presence in his paintings. His work speaks of exile and deals with political assassinations and oppression. His country of origin is always present and his passion-ate relationship with it can go from adora-tion to hatred. Between reality and fiction, his paintings evoke, in dramatic tone, sev-eral sacrificial exiled figures like writer and diplomat Ángel Ganivet or the intellectual José Maria Blanco White who, in a series of paintings, takes the form of a character emptied of his substance, made up more of clothes than body and observed by spies wherever his is (Cock Lane, British Muse-um, Tate Gallery). A divided humanity reaches a heartbreak-ing intensity in the portrait entitled La mujer del minero Perez Martinez, Con-stantina, llamada Tina es rapada por la policia. Tina, the wife of a miner, wears earrings in the colors of Spain. These colors are also present, like in certain invitations, in the left corner of the painting. In the center of the painting is the face of this woman. Her head has been freshly shaved in public by Nationalists and she is crying with tears running down her cheeks. By using reserve, the result is an extraordinary economy of means. The artist creates a worthy and no-ble icon of pain whose origins are political but also ontological. The confrontation with death, in all its forms, continues to punctu-ate Arroyo’s work. The oldest painting of the exhibition, Dou-ble portrait de Bocanegra ou le jeu des 7 erreurs, shows two bullfighters painted in a strange mix of “blur” and precision. With clenched fists, they express a muted violence under a spray of flowers falling from the sky. Could it be manna from the Gods who enjoy their cape passes? Which bullfight does it concern? The upper cor-ners of the painting are marked with the colors of Spain. In the center stands the cut column from cemeteries and graves symbolizing the end, ruin. There is a blue sky brushed with white. The colors of the carnations and clothes are blood and gold. No bull is present and yet in the center of the space, death is stirred by the paint-

ing. Here, death is presence and absence. Could it be that of the haunting Spain? It is at the same time an idealized image and a sick and distorted dream where everything is out of place, as if the light colors suggest the expression of a fratricidal duel between two similar beings, two tragicomic figures dressed as toreadors. The duel, the double, the ambivalence, the enemy within shows up in all of Eduardo Arroyo’s work. At the end of his exile in 1976, Eduardo Ar-royo had to confront a Spain he no longer recognized. His return to the country was difficult and traumatic. He continues to heal the open wounds in his creations. Just like a nagging fever, the image of Spain returns in his pictorial obsessions.

SCISSORS AND PENCILS (Passage Braque; Michel Guy Room; Kandinsky Room)Eduardo Arroyo claims his passion for draw-ing, and the place he gives to it feeds as much his painting as it does all of his work: pencil, watercolor, pastel, cutting, collage... His works on paper strike, time after time, with force, softness, the seduction of colors and lines, or with graphics borrowed from advertising and comics. With the Ramoneurs series, Eduardo Ar-royo uses the effects of sandpaper in tone on tone in a dark, obscure atmosphere. Ar-royo has put a mask on the chimney sweep, a shadowy figure, an ambivalent being on the edge of good and evil, who, like a gen-tleman thief or a fighter of crime, climbs on roofs and operates in the silence of the night. Tuxedo, top hat and tie replace the tools and clothing of the trade. This game of “differences” and this art that goes against typecasting plunge the character into a the-atre where he becomes an intriguing clown, sad and threatening. The atmosphere of this series, similar to that of film noir, sug-gests the cycle of crime paintings Toute la ville en parle created in the 1980s and inspired by the eponymous 1935 film “The Whole Town’s Talking” by John Ford. Edu-ardo Arroyo also made a series of drawings entitled La Nuit espagnole as a tribute to the work of the same name by Francis Picabia. He reinterprets the enigmatic at-mosphere of the surrealist painter’s famous 1922 painting by representing two black and white figures, one male and one female “riddled” with colored targets. He reproduc-

es the ambiguous positions of the two char-acters, a man raising his arms which could symbolize a knife thrower or a fandango dancer.For the exhibition at the Fondation Maeght, Eduardo Arroyo presents an extraordinary work entitled Agneau Mystique. This work is a full size reinterpretation of the al-tarpiece L’Adoration de l’agneau mystique, a polyptych of ten wooden panels from the Saint Bavo cathedral in Ghent painted in oil by the Flemish brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck in the first half of the fifteenth century. Here, Arroyo transposes the work in black and white using pencil on sheets of paper. “In the lower panels of this work, he has replaced the Adoration of the Lamb by the faithful, the angels, the known or unknown characters waiting to drink at the fountain of life with a proliferation of flies, lined up on two panels, like two setting boards of an entomologist. They take over the entire space previously devoted to “la Vita Nova”, symbolized by the Lamb of God, to take him toward another “paradise”, horizontal and without transcendence. Here again, life and death, art and the history of art, heroes and martyrs lead the way to the heart of this rewriting of the Flemish masterpiece”, says Olivier Kaeppelin. This paradise of flies (another name for Spain) which he has fun with in this painting as well as in the drawing Místico y moscas is recurrent throughout his work.Eduardo Arroyo is also heavily involved with the art of collage. “It is precisely this se-rial aspect, fragmented, divided, these stylistic differences, these mixtures, all this lack of consistency that is ul-timately the consistency of my work”, he says. His collages borrow from the liter-ary genres of autofiction, travel diaries and crime novels. Arroyo likes mysterious and ambivalent creatures from the shadows. He pays tribute to some “champion burglars”, to boxer Emile Di Cristo as well as to ar-chitect and Finnish designer Alvar Aalto, or Sigmund Freud...

RECENT PAINTINGS (Miró Room)“Originally, my paintings were more anecdotal, created with the materials. With time, I abandoned the materials... It is true that there has been a pro-found change in my work. When Spain

regained its freedom, I also found my own freedom. I was less obsessed by themes of Spanishness. My painting has become softer, more cryptic, more ambiguous, more surreal. Now I paint in Paris, in Madrid and I paint in my mountain of Leon, near Asturias. These are my three favorite places.”The exhibition presents a series of recent Eduardo Arroyo paintings created for this exhibition. Here we find his keen sense of staging which he developed by creating several stage sets for theatre in Salzburg and Paris, for Klaus Michael Grüber in particular. By always maintaining a quirky and playful side, his work has continued to examine the history of culture, politics and religion while expressing his constant questioning of the present. In these color-ful surrealistic paintings, Eduardo Arroyo portrays or evokes different personalities: painters as seen in Van Gogh sur le bil-lard d’Auvers-Sur-Oise or Hodler et son modèle, or literary personalities like editors Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier or writ-ers, Arthur Quiller-Couch, James Joyce, Miguel de Cervantès and Oscar Wilde with the famous character from his only novel in The Picture of Dorian Gray at the center.In the diptych entitled Sylvia Beach fête la publication d’Ulysse de Joyce dans la cuisine d’Adrienne Monnier, Eduar-do Arroyo painted these two women who shared their life and their passion for books. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was banned for its obscenity in the United States until 1931 but was published in its entirety in Paris in 1922 by the Shakespeare and Company bookshop, founded by the Amer-ican Sylvia Beach who shared her life with Frenchwoman Adrienne Monnier. A Joyce portrait hangs on the wall in Adrienne Mon-nier’s kitchen, rue de l’Odeon. The kitchen is separated in two. Adrienne Monnier turns into Sylvia Beach, she becomes her double and they both look at each other in a mirror. The two women are facing each other, they are celebrating the release of Joyce’s book, the atmosphere is tense, the moon rises in the highest point in the kitchen. The celes-tial body is blue like the sea where Ulysse, the helmsman invented by Homer, sails and blue like the cover of the first English edition of Ulysses.(The Dijon printer Darant-iere, who was endlessly tortured by Joyce’s countless corrections, had go to Germany

to find the blue that the writer demanded).Le retour des croisades, a large picture essentially composed of a patchwork of colorful landscapes, represents a picador on horseback. After being captured, thrust into slavery in the cauldron of Algiers, Cervantes returned to Spain. Wishing to remain the knight that he was, he turned toward literature, “this shared invention which he received from heaven and which he is most proud of,” to write Don Quixote.James Joyce and Miguel de Cervantès re-mind us that Arroyo began as a writer and he remains one, even when he paints. A novel sleeps under each one of his images.

VANITIES AND FLIES (Miró courtyard)“The fly is a talisman animal that I completely made Hispanic, it is part of my writings, I drew it for the cover of a book, I also sculpted it. I define Spain as “the paradise of the flies”, they are sometimes so numerous, cruel and vi-olent that they become worrisome. “Arroyo evokes a Spain whose other name is the “Paradise of the flies”, like the flies he has chosen for the exhibition poster. And like the flies for which he has built a sur-prising little theater in the Fondation Mae-ght’s Miró courtyard where they fly from floor to ceiling, heavy and slow, over stone vanities and where the walls are covered in wallpaper featuring flies.Since ancient times, the fly has represent-ed an odious animal capable of harassing humans and driving them crazy. Here, it also evokes Beelzebub whose name means “lord of the flies”, the evil deity who an-nounces the devil from religious books of the Babylonians, but also ancient Egypt. There is also the theme of the vanities in the form of skulls, large stones rounded by torrents and marked at the eye sockets and mouth with lead inclusions.

BERLIN (Chagall Room)Arroyo stayed in Berlin in 1975-76 as part of an artist residency program for DAAD, Academy of Fine Arts. He found it a fasci-nating city that stimulated his creativity. The population in particular captured his atten-tion. Amazed by the duality of this ghost town, Eduardo Arroyo compared the misery of the Turkish Kreuzberg neighborhood to a

thriving East in his dark series L’opus ber-linois, carefully preserved in Museum Is-land which is filled with relics from Egyptian civilization. To evoke the Turkish immigrant neighborhoods, Eduardo Arroyo looked for objects such as rugs and also for the very material of the city itself, using the rubber coated floors in train station and airport waiting rooms. He was seduced by “the black of this new material, its pene-trating, oily odor without conditions.”It is also during this nine-month stay in Germany that Eduardo Arroyo worked on the replica of Rembrandt’s Ronde de Nuit with his Ronde de nuit aux gourdins revisited. Framed by two panels depicting urban landscapes at twilight, his pastiche presents characters from the celebrated painting, however, this time, holding base-ball bats, batons and clubs which have replaced the swords, muskets, spears and harquebuses of the warriors from the seventeenth century. Eduardo Arroyo, who seeks to be a “painter of history”, denounc-es here again the oppression and violence carried out by totalitarian regimes. This pe-riod marks a particular point in time in his life and work with the agony of “Caudillo” who died in late 1975. His stay in this city which he considered at the time to be con-fined, imprisoned and enclosed would now be associated with a sense of newfound freedom.“The idea of a mystifying painting in-terested me; A bourgeois society in fact financed Rembrandt to transform merchants and shopkeepers into he-roes and warriors. A mystification of history, as Marx said: “The first time as tragedy and the second as come-dy.” To penetrate further into a work, we must add an element of drama or farce. This is exactly the case with my painting, which is a good blend of drama and operetta. In 1715, La Ron-de was trimmed so it could be trans-ferred from the house of Arquebusiers to Amsterdam City Hall. They cut off a strip from all four sides of the paint-ing. It was mutilated. I wanted to re-turn the missing parts to the painting by increasing its size, but also put the assault scene with clubs and sledge-hammers on a street in Madrid. I cre-ated the parable of a world ending with the death of Franco. “

Passage Michel Guy and Kandinsky Room: to refer to “Scissors and Pencils.”

PAINTING RESCUES PAINTING (Giacometti Room)Figures from combat sports are part of Edu-ardo Arroyo’s pictorial universe. The artist’s true passion for boxing led him to devote a cycle of works to its figures starting in 1972. The figure of the boxer, “athlete of survival”, metaphorically refers to the lonely and combative path of the painter. Eduardo Arroyo makes reference to an epi-sode in the Book of Genesis that fascinated Rembrandt, Gustave Doré, but especially Delacroix whose famous painting La Lutte de Jacob avec l’Ange is devoted to this episode. Arroyo’s interpretation of the strug-gle of Jacob, forced to go up against the an-gel, turns toward the noble art. Jacob’s fight with the angel is a combat that resembles a boxing match: “a dance of athletes, men wrapped in each other’s arms, bathed in sweat, an embrace governed by rules which must be followed”, wrote Eduardo Arroyo who continues, “And the painter’s fear is revealed, he fears that the more he tries to find colors, tones, glazes, the more the material of the painting becomes mud, muck, stinking mire. On the one side, Jacob attacks the angel and on the other, Delacroix fights against painting knowing that he is gradually losing this daily battle against the greens : Veronese green, bottle green, sea green, green-black, and in the darkness grows the poison of verdigris.”This passion for the styles and the effects of paint are found in the work entitled Dans le respect des traditions, the title of this exhibition chosen by Arroyo. Here, the same landscape is painted in four “styles”: the style of a nineteenth century, nature painting like a “Corot”, then pointillism or Dutch post-cubism and expressionism. This “amusing” exercise shows that painting can do anything. It can convince us of a sub-ject’s truth or a point of view but it is also just a game of styles, “approaches”, with this pleasure to lure and to experience “the lack of reality” in the world.Eduardo Arroyo uses the true and false, not only for his sole desire to juggle with illu-sion but to formulate a direction he wants to tightrope across. He combines conviction

with doubt, belief with ridicule. With this un-stable equilibrium, he is one of the closest heirs to the thinking and attitudes of Francis Picabia.

FIGURE LANDSCAPE MARINE (Michel Guy Room; Giacometti Room)A pioneer of narrative figuration, Eduardo Arroyo questions the pictorial narrative. His paintings deal with life, the world and the images he sees everyday. He upsets habitual patterns and plays with notions of history, tales and parables. Always with this touch of incongruity particular to the artist, the oil on canvas entitled La Guerra de dos mundos, done in the spirit of 1960s comics, puts a chained Mickey, symbolizing young America, up against a mule bearing the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean. For Arroyo, painting is the prayer of the painter. Here again, he shares his struggle with the angel. The triptych Yanek Walzak is dedicated to the former welterweight champion of France who fought Cerdan, Dauthuille, Sugar Ray Robinson and evokes the dance of the boxer, his fighting position, raised hands and the sadness of hanging gloves. These analogies between life and combat, desire and madness, power and love, are found in the painting he dedicated to Boris Godounov, as a tribute to Klaus Mi-chael Grüber.

WINSTON CHURCHILL AND THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND (Giacometti Room)Portraiture has been a recurrent theme in his work since the 1960s. Eduardo Arroyo’s mocking and critical images have made his portraits, often caricatures, a special genre. His paintings are full of familiar characters and their doubles. The Spanish artist redi-rects the classical genre of self-portraiture and portraiture by showing “real” subjects with “false” features, “false” faces, pre-ferring “masks” showing the inside of the characters with psychological or historical representations. Fictitious or real charac-ters, famous or anonymous, Eduardo Arroyo orchestrates a true role play of masks and disguises. In his theatrical and metaphorical staging, we find many historical figures (the Queen of England, Cleopatra, Napoleon...). There are politicians like Winston Churchill shown sitting with his back to us with his recognizable, imposing stature. He is in a

painter’s position in his chair accompanied by ceramics which evoke the ingredients and the palette of Winston Churchill the art-ist. To attack the “grotesque” of our time, he takes pleasure in presenting emptiness as in Le Meilleur cheval du monde, an equestrian portrait of Elizabeth II made anonymous by “devouring” the face with paint.

SAINT BERNARDAND THE PONT D’ARCOLE (Giacometti Room)The Spanish artist has also desecrated a few well-known personalities. His rep-resentations of them are totally free which give double meanings to the interpreta-tions of Napoléon Bonaparte or the Pont d’Arcole series. Napoléon Bonaparte, the victor in the Battle of Arcola and repre-sented heroically in all history textbooks is caricatured by Arroyo through anamorphic shapes. Here, there is the stereotypical im-age of the victor.

SCULPTURES(Giacometti Room)The Foundation presents a set of bronze sculptures and unique pieces made of var-ious materials that give a comprehensive look at a part of Eduardo Arroyo’s work that is not well known in France. As if in a delusion, this set of sculptures give rise to games, dreams and many characters who, by association, are part of the imag-inary theatre of Eduardo Arroyo: Mickey and Donald, the Lady of Baza, the Princess of the Ursines, Frida Kahlo, but also amazing hybrid characters like Dante-Cyrano de Bergerac, Tolstoy-Bécassine, just until the last sculpture of the exhibition in the atri-um, Unicornio de Laciana, a disturbing bestiale creature which expresses both the bull and the monsters Goya dreamed to see disappear at dawn.

Page 3: BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • … · gle painting based on La Ronde de nuit by Rembrandt and creates his first reliefs in rubber. January 1977 First solo

HAUNTING SPAIN(Braque Room)Eduardo Arroyo was born in Madrid in 1937 and is a child of the Spanish Civil War. The specter of what Spain would be until Franco’s death, his “haunting Spain”, has a recurring presence in his paintings. His work speaks of exile and deals with political assassinations and oppression. His country of origin is always present and his passion-ate relationship with it can go from adora-tion to hatred. Between reality and fiction, his paintings evoke, in dramatic tone, sev-eral sacrificial exiled figures like writer and diplomat Ángel Ganivet or the intellectual José Maria Blanco White who, in a series of paintings, takes the form of a character emptied of his substance, made up more of clothes than body and observed by spies wherever his is (Cock Lane, British Muse-um, Tate Gallery). A divided humanity reaches a heartbreak-ing intensity in the portrait entitled La mujer del minero Perez Martinez, Con-stantina, llamada Tina es rapada por la policia. Tina, the wife of a miner, wears earrings in the colors of Spain. These colors are also present, like in certain invitations, in the left corner of the painting. In the center of the painting is the face of this woman. Her head has been freshly shaved in public by Nationalists and she is crying with tears running down her cheeks. By using reserve, the result is an extraordinary economy of means. The artist creates a worthy and no-ble icon of pain whose origins are political but also ontological. The confrontation with death, in all its forms, continues to punctu-ate Arroyo’s work. The oldest painting of the exhibition, Dou-ble portrait de Bocanegra ou le jeu des 7 erreurs, shows two bullfighters painted in a strange mix of “blur” and precision. With clenched fists, they express a muted violence under a spray of flowers falling from the sky. Could it be manna from the Gods who enjoy their cape passes? Which bullfight does it concern? The upper cor-ners of the painting are marked with the colors of Spain. In the center stands the cut column from cemeteries and graves symbolizing the end, ruin. There is a blue sky brushed with white. The colors of the carnations and clothes are blood and gold. No bull is present and yet in the center of the space, death is stirred by the paint-

ing. Here, death is presence and absence. Could it be that of the haunting Spain? It is at the same time an idealized image and a sick and distorted dream where everything is out of place, as if the light colors suggest the expression of a fratricidal duel between two similar beings, two tragicomic figures dressed as toreadors. The duel, the double, the ambivalence, the enemy within shows up in all of Eduardo Arroyo’s work. At the end of his exile in 1976, Eduardo Ar-royo had to confront a Spain he no longer recognized. His return to the country was difficult and traumatic. He continues to heal the open wounds in his creations. Just like a nagging fever, the image of Spain returns in his pictorial obsessions.

SCISSORS AND PENCILS (Passage Braque; Michel Guy Room; Kandinsky Room)Eduardo Arroyo claims his passion for draw-ing, and the place he gives to it feeds as much his painting as it does all of his work: pencil, watercolor, pastel, cutting, collage... His works on paper strike, time after time, with force, softness, the seduction of colors and lines, or with graphics borrowed from advertising and comics. With the Ramoneurs series, Eduardo Ar-royo uses the effects of sandpaper in tone on tone in a dark, obscure atmosphere. Ar-royo has put a mask on the chimney sweep, a shadowy figure, an ambivalent being on the edge of good and evil, who, like a gen-tleman thief or a fighter of crime, climbs on roofs and operates in the silence of the night. Tuxedo, top hat and tie replace the tools and clothing of the trade. This game of “differences” and this art that goes against typecasting plunge the character into a the-atre where he becomes an intriguing clown, sad and threatening. The atmosphere of this series, similar to that of film noir, sug-gests the cycle of crime paintings Toute la ville en parle created in the 1980s and inspired by the eponymous 1935 film “The Whole Town’s Talking” by John Ford. Edu-ardo Arroyo also made a series of drawings entitled La Nuit espagnole as a tribute to the work of the same name by Francis Picabia. He reinterprets the enigmatic at-mosphere of the surrealist painter’s famous 1922 painting by representing two black and white figures, one male and one female “riddled” with colored targets. He reproduc-

es the ambiguous positions of the two char-acters, a man raising his arms which could symbolize a knife thrower or a fandango dancer.For the exhibition at the Fondation Maeght, Eduardo Arroyo presents an extraordinary work entitled Agneau Mystique. This work is a full size reinterpretation of the al-tarpiece L’Adoration de l’agneau mystique, a polyptych of ten wooden panels from the Saint Bavo cathedral in Ghent painted in oil by the Flemish brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck in the first half of the fifteenth century. Here, Arroyo transposes the work in black and white using pencil on sheets of paper. “In the lower panels of this work, he has replaced the Adoration of the Lamb by the faithful, the angels, the known or unknown characters waiting to drink at the fountain of life with a proliferation of flies, lined up on two panels, like two setting boards of an entomologist. They take over the entire space previously devoted to “la Vita Nova”, symbolized by the Lamb of God, to take him toward another “paradise”, horizontal and without transcendence. Here again, life and death, art and the history of art, heroes and martyrs lead the way to the heart of this rewriting of the Flemish masterpiece”, says Olivier Kaeppelin. This paradise of flies (another name for Spain) which he has fun with in this painting as well as in the drawing Místico y moscas is recurrent throughout his work.Eduardo Arroyo is also heavily involved with the art of collage. “It is precisely this se-rial aspect, fragmented, divided, these stylistic differences, these mixtures, all this lack of consistency that is ul-timately the consistency of my work”, he says. His collages borrow from the liter-ary genres of autofiction, travel diaries and crime novels. Arroyo likes mysterious and ambivalent creatures from the shadows. He pays tribute to some “champion burglars”, to boxer Emile Di Cristo as well as to ar-chitect and Finnish designer Alvar Aalto, or Sigmund Freud...

RECENT PAINTINGS (Miró Room)“Originally, my paintings were more anecdotal, created with the materials. With time, I abandoned the materials... It is true that there has been a pro-found change in my work. When Spain

regained its freedom, I also found my own freedom. I was less obsessed by themes of Spanishness. My painting has become softer, more cryptic, more ambiguous, more surreal. Now I paint in Paris, in Madrid and I paint in my mountain of Leon, near Asturias. These are my three favorite places.”The exhibition presents a series of recent Eduardo Arroyo paintings created for this exhibition. Here we find his keen sense of staging which he developed by creating several stage sets for theatre in Salzburg and Paris, for Klaus Michael Grüber in particular. By always maintaining a quirky and playful side, his work has continued to examine the history of culture, politics and religion while expressing his constant questioning of the present. In these color-ful surrealistic paintings, Eduardo Arroyo portrays or evokes different personalities: painters as seen in Van Gogh sur le bil-lard d’Auvers-Sur-Oise or Hodler et son modèle, or literary personalities like editors Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier or writ-ers, Arthur Quiller-Couch, James Joyce, Miguel de Cervantès and Oscar Wilde with the famous character from his only novel in The Picture of Dorian Gray at the center.In the diptych entitled Sylvia Beach fête la publication d’Ulysse de Joyce dans la cuisine d’Adrienne Monnier, Eduar-do Arroyo painted these two women who shared their life and their passion for books. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was banned for its obscenity in the United States until 1931 but was published in its entirety in Paris in 1922 by the Shakespeare and Company bookshop, founded by the Amer-ican Sylvia Beach who shared her life with Frenchwoman Adrienne Monnier. A Joyce portrait hangs on the wall in Adrienne Mon-nier’s kitchen, rue de l’Odeon. The kitchen is separated in two. Adrienne Monnier turns into Sylvia Beach, she becomes her double and they both look at each other in a mirror. The two women are facing each other, they are celebrating the release of Joyce’s book, the atmosphere is tense, the moon rises in the highest point in the kitchen. The celes-tial body is blue like the sea where Ulysse, the helmsman invented by Homer, sails and blue like the cover of the first English edition of Ulysses.(The Dijon printer Darant-iere, who was endlessly tortured by Joyce’s countless corrections, had go to Germany

to find the blue that the writer demanded).Le retour des croisades, a large picture essentially composed of a patchwork of colorful landscapes, represents a picador on horseback. After being captured, thrust into slavery in the cauldron of Algiers, Cervantes returned to Spain. Wishing to remain the knight that he was, he turned toward literature, “this shared invention which he received from heaven and which he is most proud of,” to write Don Quixote.James Joyce and Miguel de Cervantès re-mind us that Arroyo began as a writer and he remains one, even when he paints. A novel sleeps under each one of his images.

VANITIES AND FLIES (Miró courtyard)“The fly is a talisman animal that I completely made Hispanic, it is part of my writings, I drew it for the cover of a book, I also sculpted it. I define Spain as “the paradise of the flies”, they are sometimes so numerous, cruel and vi-olent that they become worrisome. “Arroyo evokes a Spain whose other name is the “Paradise of the flies”, like the flies he has chosen for the exhibition poster. And like the flies for which he has built a sur-prising little theater in the Fondation Mae-ght’s Miró courtyard where they fly from floor to ceiling, heavy and slow, over stone vanities and where the walls are covered in wallpaper featuring flies.Since ancient times, the fly has represent-ed an odious animal capable of harassing humans and driving them crazy. Here, it also evokes Beelzebub whose name means “lord of the flies”, the evil deity who an-nounces the devil from religious books of the Babylonians, but also ancient Egypt. There is also the theme of the vanities in the form of skulls, large stones rounded by torrents and marked at the eye sockets and mouth with lead inclusions.

BERLIN (Chagall Room)Arroyo stayed in Berlin in 1975-76 as part of an artist residency program for DAAD, Academy of Fine Arts. He found it a fasci-nating city that stimulated his creativity. The population in particular captured his atten-tion. Amazed by the duality of this ghost town, Eduardo Arroyo compared the misery of the Turkish Kreuzberg neighborhood to a

thriving East in his dark series L’opus ber-linois, carefully preserved in Museum Is-land which is filled with relics from Egyptian civilization. To evoke the Turkish immigrant neighborhoods, Eduardo Arroyo looked for objects such as rugs and also for the very material of the city itself, using the rubber coated floors in train station and airport waiting rooms. He was seduced by “the black of this new material, its pene-trating, oily odor without conditions.”It is also during this nine-month stay in Germany that Eduardo Arroyo worked on the replica of Rembrandt’s Ronde de Nuit with his Ronde de nuit aux gourdins revisited. Framed by two panels depicting urban landscapes at twilight, his pastiche presents characters from the celebrated painting, however, this time, holding base-ball bats, batons and clubs which have replaced the swords, muskets, spears and harquebuses of the warriors from the seventeenth century. Eduardo Arroyo, who seeks to be a “painter of history”, denounc-es here again the oppression and violence carried out by totalitarian regimes. This pe-riod marks a particular point in time in his life and work with the agony of “Caudillo” who died in late 1975. His stay in this city which he considered at the time to be con-fined, imprisoned and enclosed would now be associated with a sense of newfound freedom.“The idea of a mystifying painting in-terested me; A bourgeois society in fact financed Rembrandt to transform merchants and shopkeepers into he-roes and warriors. A mystification of history, as Marx said: “The first time as tragedy and the second as come-dy.” To penetrate further into a work, we must add an element of drama or farce. This is exactly the case with my painting, which is a good blend of drama and operetta. In 1715, La Ron-de was trimmed so it could be trans-ferred from the house of Arquebusiers to Amsterdam City Hall. They cut off a strip from all four sides of the paint-ing. It was mutilated. I wanted to re-turn the missing parts to the painting by increasing its size, but also put the assault scene with clubs and sledge-hammers on a street in Madrid. I cre-ated the parable of a world ending with the death of Franco. “

Passage Michel Guy and Kandinsky Room: to refer to “Scissors and Pencils.”

PAINTING RESCUES PAINTING (Giacometti Room)Figures from combat sports are part of Edu-ardo Arroyo’s pictorial universe. The artist’s true passion for boxing led him to devote a cycle of works to its figures starting in 1972. The figure of the boxer, “athlete of survival”, metaphorically refers to the lonely and combative path of the painter. Eduardo Arroyo makes reference to an epi-sode in the Book of Genesis that fascinated Rembrandt, Gustave Doré, but especially Delacroix whose famous painting La Lutte de Jacob avec l’Ange is devoted to this episode. Arroyo’s interpretation of the strug-gle of Jacob, forced to go up against the an-gel, turns toward the noble art. Jacob’s fight with the angel is a combat that resembles a boxing match: “a dance of athletes, men wrapped in each other’s arms, bathed in sweat, an embrace governed by rules which must be followed”, wrote Eduardo Arroyo who continues, “And the painter’s fear is revealed, he fears that the more he tries to find colors, tones, glazes, the more the material of the painting becomes mud, muck, stinking mire. On the one side, Jacob attacks the angel and on the other, Delacroix fights against painting knowing that he is gradually losing this daily battle against the greens : Veronese green, bottle green, sea green, green-black, and in the darkness grows the poison of verdigris.”This passion for the styles and the effects of paint are found in the work entitled Dans le respect des traditions, the title of this exhibition chosen by Arroyo. Here, the same landscape is painted in four “styles”: the style of a nineteenth century, nature painting like a “Corot”, then pointillism or Dutch post-cubism and expressionism. This “amusing” exercise shows that painting can do anything. It can convince us of a sub-ject’s truth or a point of view but it is also just a game of styles, “approaches”, with this pleasure to lure and to experience “the lack of reality” in the world.Eduardo Arroyo uses the true and false, not only for his sole desire to juggle with illu-sion but to formulate a direction he wants to tightrope across. He combines conviction

with doubt, belief with ridicule. With this un-stable equilibrium, he is one of the closest heirs to the thinking and attitudes of Francis Picabia.

FIGURE LANDSCAPE MARINE (Michel Guy Room; Giacometti Room)A pioneer of narrative figuration, Eduardo Arroyo questions the pictorial narrative. His paintings deal with life, the world and the images he sees everyday. He upsets habitual patterns and plays with notions of history, tales and parables. Always with this touch of incongruity particular to the artist, the oil on canvas entitled La Guerra de dos mundos, done in the spirit of 1960s comics, puts a chained Mickey, symbolizing young America, up against a mule bearing the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean. For Arroyo, painting is the prayer of the painter. Here again, he shares his struggle with the angel. The triptych Yanek Walzak is dedicated to the former welterweight champion of France who fought Cerdan, Dauthuille, Sugar Ray Robinson and evokes the dance of the boxer, his fighting position, raised hands and the sadness of hanging gloves. These analogies between life and combat, desire and madness, power and love, are found in the painting he dedicated to Boris Godounov, as a tribute to Klaus Mi-chael Grüber.

WINSTON CHURCHILL AND THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND (Giacometti Room)Portraiture has been a recurrent theme in his work since the 1960s. Eduardo Arroyo’s mocking and critical images have made his portraits, often caricatures, a special genre. His paintings are full of familiar characters and their doubles. The Spanish artist redi-rects the classical genre of self-portraiture and portraiture by showing “real” subjects with “false” features, “false” faces, pre-ferring “masks” showing the inside of the characters with psychological or historical representations. Fictitious or real charac-ters, famous or anonymous, Eduardo Arroyo orchestrates a true role play of masks and disguises. In his theatrical and metaphorical staging, we find many historical figures (the Queen of England, Cleopatra, Napoleon...). There are politicians like Winston Churchill shown sitting with his back to us with his recognizable, imposing stature. He is in a

painter’s position in his chair accompanied by ceramics which evoke the ingredients and the palette of Winston Churchill the art-ist. To attack the “grotesque” of our time, he takes pleasure in presenting emptiness as in Le Meilleur cheval du monde, an equestrian portrait of Elizabeth II made anonymous by “devouring” the face with paint.

SAINT BERNARDAND THE PONT D’ARCOLE (Giacometti Room)The Spanish artist has also desecrated a few well-known personalities. His rep-resentations of them are totally free which give double meanings to the interpreta-tions of Napoléon Bonaparte or the Pont d’Arcole series. Napoléon Bonaparte, the victor in the Battle of Arcola and repre-sented heroically in all history textbooks is caricatured by Arroyo through anamorphic shapes. Here, there is the stereotypical im-age of the victor.

SCULPTURES(Giacometti Room)The Foundation presents a set of bronze sculptures and unique pieces made of var-ious materials that give a comprehensive look at a part of Eduardo Arroyo’s work that is not well known in France. As if in a delusion, this set of sculptures give rise to games, dreams and many characters who, by association, are part of the imag-inary theatre of Eduardo Arroyo: Mickey and Donald, the Lady of Baza, the Princess of the Ursines, Frida Kahlo, but also amazing hybrid characters like Dante-Cyrano de Bergerac, Tolstoy-Bécassine, just until the last sculpture of the exhibition in the atri-um, Unicornio de Laciana, a disturbing bestiale creature which expresses both the bull and the monsters Goya dreamed to see disappear at dawn.

Page 4: BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • … · gle painting based on La Ronde de nuit by Rembrandt and creates his first reliefs in rubber. January 1977 First solo

HAUNTING SPAIN(Braque Room)Eduardo Arroyo was born in Madrid in 1937 and is a child of the Spanish Civil War. The specter of what Spain would be until Franco’s death, his “haunting Spain”, has a recurring presence in his paintings. His work speaks of exile and deals with political assassinations and oppression. His country of origin is always present and his passion-ate relationship with it can go from adora-tion to hatred. Between reality and fiction, his paintings evoke, in dramatic tone, sev-eral sacrificial exiled figures like writer and diplomat Ángel Ganivet or the intellectual José Maria Blanco White who, in a series of paintings, takes the form of a character emptied of his substance, made up more of clothes than body and observed by spies wherever his is (Cock Lane, British Muse-um, Tate Gallery). A divided humanity reaches a heartbreak-ing intensity in the portrait entitled La mujer del minero Perez Martinez, Con-stantina, llamada Tina es rapada por la policia. Tina, the wife of a miner, wears earrings in the colors of Spain. These colors are also present, like in certain invitations, in the left corner of the painting. In the center of the painting is the face of this woman. Her head has been freshly shaved in public by Nationalists and she is crying with tears running down her cheeks. By using reserve, the result is an extraordinary economy of means. The artist creates a worthy and no-ble icon of pain whose origins are political but also ontological. The confrontation with death, in all its forms, continues to punctu-ate Arroyo’s work. The oldest painting of the exhibition, Dou-ble portrait de Bocanegra ou le jeu des 7 erreurs, shows two bullfighters painted in a strange mix of “blur” and precision. With clenched fists, they express a muted violence under a spray of flowers falling from the sky. Could it be manna from the Gods who enjoy their cape passes? Which bullfight does it concern? The upper cor-ners of the painting are marked with the colors of Spain. In the center stands the cut column from cemeteries and graves symbolizing the end, ruin. There is a blue sky brushed with white. The colors of the carnations and clothes are blood and gold. No bull is present and yet in the center of the space, death is stirred by the paint-

ing. Here, death is presence and absence. Could it be that of the haunting Spain? It is at the same time an idealized image and a sick and distorted dream where everything is out of place, as if the light colors suggest the expression of a fratricidal duel between two similar beings, two tragicomic figures dressed as toreadors. The duel, the double, the ambivalence, the enemy within shows up in all of Eduardo Arroyo’s work. At the end of his exile in 1976, Eduardo Ar-royo had to confront a Spain he no longer recognized. His return to the country was difficult and traumatic. He continues to heal the open wounds in his creations. Just like a nagging fever, the image of Spain returns in his pictorial obsessions.

SCISSORS AND PENCILS (Passage Braque; Michel Guy Room; Kandinsky Room)Eduardo Arroyo claims his passion for draw-ing, and the place he gives to it feeds as much his painting as it does all of his work: pencil, watercolor, pastel, cutting, collage... His works on paper strike, time after time, with force, softness, the seduction of colors and lines, or with graphics borrowed from advertising and comics. With the Ramoneurs series, Eduardo Ar-royo uses the effects of sandpaper in tone on tone in a dark, obscure atmosphere. Ar-royo has put a mask on the chimney sweep, a shadowy figure, an ambivalent being on the edge of good and evil, who, like a gen-tleman thief or a fighter of crime, climbs on roofs and operates in the silence of the night. Tuxedo, top hat and tie replace the tools and clothing of the trade. This game of “differences” and this art that goes against typecasting plunge the character into a the-atre where he becomes an intriguing clown, sad and threatening. The atmosphere of this series, similar to that of film noir, sug-gests the cycle of crime paintings Toute la ville en parle created in the 1980s and inspired by the eponymous 1935 film “The Whole Town’s Talking” by John Ford. Edu-ardo Arroyo also made a series of drawings entitled La Nuit espagnole as a tribute to the work of the same name by Francis Picabia. He reinterprets the enigmatic at-mosphere of the surrealist painter’s famous 1922 painting by representing two black and white figures, one male and one female “riddled” with colored targets. He reproduc-

es the ambiguous positions of the two char-acters, a man raising his arms which could symbolize a knife thrower or a fandango dancer.For the exhibition at the Fondation Maeght, Eduardo Arroyo presents an extraordinary work entitled Agneau Mystique. This work is a full size reinterpretation of the al-tarpiece L’Adoration de l’agneau mystique, a polyptych of ten wooden panels from the Saint Bavo cathedral in Ghent painted in oil by the Flemish brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck in the first half of the fifteenth century. Here, Arroyo transposes the work in black and white using pencil on sheets of paper. “In the lower panels of this work, he has replaced the Adoration of the Lamb by the faithful, the angels, the known or unknown characters waiting to drink at the fountain of life with a proliferation of flies, lined up on two panels, like two setting boards of an entomologist. They take over the entire space previously devoted to “la Vita Nova”, symbolized by the Lamb of God, to take him toward another “paradise”, horizontal and without transcendence. Here again, life and death, art and the history of art, heroes and martyrs lead the way to the heart of this rewriting of the Flemish masterpiece”, says Olivier Kaeppelin. This paradise of flies (another name for Spain) which he has fun with in this painting as well as in the drawing Místico y moscas is recurrent throughout his work.Eduardo Arroyo is also heavily involved with the art of collage. “It is precisely this se-rial aspect, fragmented, divided, these stylistic differences, these mixtures, all this lack of consistency that is ul-timately the consistency of my work”, he says. His collages borrow from the liter-ary genres of autofiction, travel diaries and crime novels. Arroyo likes mysterious and ambivalent creatures from the shadows. He pays tribute to some “champion burglars”, to boxer Emile Di Cristo as well as to ar-chitect and Finnish designer Alvar Aalto, or Sigmund Freud...

RECENT PAINTINGS (Miró Room)“Originally, my paintings were more anecdotal, created with the materials. With time, I abandoned the materials... It is true that there has been a pro-found change in my work. When Spain

regained its freedom, I also found my own freedom. I was less obsessed by themes of Spanishness. My painting has become softer, more cryptic, more ambiguous, more surreal. Now I paint in Paris, in Madrid and I paint in my mountain of Leon, near Asturias. These are my three favorite places.”The exhibition presents a series of recent Eduardo Arroyo paintings created for this exhibition. Here we find his keen sense of staging which he developed by creating several stage sets for theatre in Salzburg and Paris, for Klaus Michael Grüber in particular. By always maintaining a quirky and playful side, his work has continued to examine the history of culture, politics and religion while expressing his constant questioning of the present. In these color-ful surrealistic paintings, Eduardo Arroyo portrays or evokes different personalities: painters as seen in Van Gogh sur le bil-lard d’Auvers-Sur-Oise or Hodler et son modèle, or literary personalities like editors Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier or writ-ers, Arthur Quiller-Couch, James Joyce, Miguel de Cervantès and Oscar Wilde with the famous character from his only novel in The Picture of Dorian Gray at the center.In the diptych entitled Sylvia Beach fête la publication d’Ulysse de Joyce dans la cuisine d’Adrienne Monnier, Eduar-do Arroyo painted these two women who shared their life and their passion for books. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was banned for its obscenity in the United States until 1931 but was published in its entirety in Paris in 1922 by the Shakespeare and Company bookshop, founded by the Amer-ican Sylvia Beach who shared her life with Frenchwoman Adrienne Monnier. A Joyce portrait hangs on the wall in Adrienne Mon-nier’s kitchen, rue de l’Odeon. The kitchen is separated in two. Adrienne Monnier turns into Sylvia Beach, she becomes her double and they both look at each other in a mirror. The two women are facing each other, they are celebrating the release of Joyce’s book, the atmosphere is tense, the moon rises in the highest point in the kitchen. The celes-tial body is blue like the sea where Ulysse, the helmsman invented by Homer, sails and blue like the cover of the first English edition of Ulysses.(The Dijon printer Darant-iere, who was endlessly tortured by Joyce’s countless corrections, had go to Germany

to find the blue that the writer demanded).Le retour des croisades, a large picture essentially composed of a patchwork of colorful landscapes, represents a picador on horseback. After being captured, thrust into slavery in the cauldron of Algiers, Cervantes returned to Spain. Wishing to remain the knight that he was, he turned toward literature, “this shared invention which he received from heaven and which he is most proud of,” to write Don Quixote.James Joyce and Miguel de Cervantès re-mind us that Arroyo began as a writer and he remains one, even when he paints. A novel sleeps under each one of his images.

VANITIES AND FLIES (Miró courtyard)“The fly is a talisman animal that I completely made Hispanic, it is part of my writings, I drew it for the cover of a book, I also sculpted it. I define Spain as “the paradise of the flies”, they are sometimes so numerous, cruel and vi-olent that they become worrisome. “Arroyo evokes a Spain whose other name is the “Paradise of the flies”, like the flies he has chosen for the exhibition poster. And like the flies for which he has built a sur-prising little theater in the Fondation Mae-ght’s Miró courtyard where they fly from floor to ceiling, heavy and slow, over stone vanities and where the walls are covered in wallpaper featuring flies.Since ancient times, the fly has represent-ed an odious animal capable of harassing humans and driving them crazy. Here, it also evokes Beelzebub whose name means “lord of the flies”, the evil deity who an-nounces the devil from religious books of the Babylonians, but also ancient Egypt. There is also the theme of the vanities in the form of skulls, large stones rounded by torrents and marked at the eye sockets and mouth with lead inclusions.

BERLIN (Chagall Room)Arroyo stayed in Berlin in 1975-76 as part of an artist residency program for DAAD, Academy of Fine Arts. He found it a fasci-nating city that stimulated his creativity. The population in particular captured his atten-tion. Amazed by the duality of this ghost town, Eduardo Arroyo compared the misery of the Turkish Kreuzberg neighborhood to a

thriving East in his dark series L’opus ber-linois, carefully preserved in Museum Is-land which is filled with relics from Egyptian civilization. To evoke the Turkish immigrant neighborhoods, Eduardo Arroyo looked for objects such as rugs and also for the very material of the city itself, using the rubber coated floors in train station and airport waiting rooms. He was seduced by “the black of this new material, its pene-trating, oily odor without conditions.”It is also during this nine-month stay in Germany that Eduardo Arroyo worked on the replica of Rembrandt’s Ronde de Nuit with his Ronde de nuit aux gourdins revisited. Framed by two panels depicting urban landscapes at twilight, his pastiche presents characters from the celebrated painting, however, this time, holding base-ball bats, batons and clubs which have replaced the swords, muskets, spears and harquebuses of the warriors from the seventeenth century. Eduardo Arroyo, who seeks to be a “painter of history”, denounc-es here again the oppression and violence carried out by totalitarian regimes. This pe-riod marks a particular point in time in his life and work with the agony of “Caudillo” who died in late 1975. His stay in this city which he considered at the time to be con-fined, imprisoned and enclosed would now be associated with a sense of newfound freedom.“The idea of a mystifying painting in-terested me; A bourgeois society in fact financed Rembrandt to transform merchants and shopkeepers into he-roes and warriors. A mystification of history, as Marx said: “The first time as tragedy and the second as come-dy.” To penetrate further into a work, we must add an element of drama or farce. This is exactly the case with my painting, which is a good blend of drama and operetta. In 1715, La Ron-de was trimmed so it could be trans-ferred from the house of Arquebusiers to Amsterdam City Hall. They cut off a strip from all four sides of the paint-ing. It was mutilated. I wanted to re-turn the missing parts to the painting by increasing its size, but also put the assault scene with clubs and sledge-hammers on a street in Madrid. I cre-ated the parable of a world ending with the death of Franco. “

Passage Michel Guy and Kandinsky Room: to refer to “Scissors and Pencils.”

PAINTING RESCUES PAINTING (Giacometti Room)Figures from combat sports are part of Edu-ardo Arroyo’s pictorial universe. The artist’s true passion for boxing led him to devote a cycle of works to its figures starting in 1972. The figure of the boxer, “athlete of survival”, metaphorically refers to the lonely and combative path of the painter. Eduardo Arroyo makes reference to an epi-sode in the Book of Genesis that fascinated Rembrandt, Gustave Doré, but especially Delacroix whose famous painting La Lutte de Jacob avec l’Ange is devoted to this episode. Arroyo’s interpretation of the strug-gle of Jacob, forced to go up against the an-gel, turns toward the noble art. Jacob’s fight with the angel is a combat that resembles a boxing match: “a dance of athletes, men wrapped in each other’s arms, bathed in sweat, an embrace governed by rules which must be followed”, wrote Eduardo Arroyo who continues, “And the painter’s fear is revealed, he fears that the more he tries to find colors, tones, glazes, the more the material of the painting becomes mud, muck, stinking mire. On the one side, Jacob attacks the angel and on the other, Delacroix fights against painting knowing that he is gradually losing this daily battle against the greens : Veronese green, bottle green, sea green, green-black, and in the darkness grows the poison of verdigris.”This passion for the styles and the effects of paint are found in the work entitled Dans le respect des traditions, the title of this exhibition chosen by Arroyo. Here, the same landscape is painted in four “styles”: the style of a nineteenth century, nature painting like a “Corot”, then pointillism or Dutch post-cubism and expressionism. This “amusing” exercise shows that painting can do anything. It can convince us of a sub-ject’s truth or a point of view but it is also just a game of styles, “approaches”, with this pleasure to lure and to experience “the lack of reality” in the world.Eduardo Arroyo uses the true and false, not only for his sole desire to juggle with illu-sion but to formulate a direction he wants to tightrope across. He combines conviction

with doubt, belief with ridicule. With this un-stable equilibrium, he is one of the closest heirs to the thinking and attitudes of Francis Picabia.

FIGURE LANDSCAPE MARINE (Michel Guy Room; Giacometti Room)A pioneer of narrative figuration, Eduardo Arroyo questions the pictorial narrative. His paintings deal with life, the world and the images he sees everyday. He upsets habitual patterns and plays with notions of history, tales and parables. Always with this touch of incongruity particular to the artist, the oil on canvas entitled La Guerra de dos mundos, done in the spirit of 1960s comics, puts a chained Mickey, symbolizing young America, up against a mule bearing the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean. For Arroyo, painting is the prayer of the painter. Here again, he shares his struggle with the angel. The triptych Yanek Walzak is dedicated to the former welterweight champion of France who fought Cerdan, Dauthuille, Sugar Ray Robinson and evokes the dance of the boxer, his fighting position, raised hands and the sadness of hanging gloves. These analogies between life and combat, desire and madness, power and love, are found in the painting he dedicated to Boris Godounov, as a tribute to Klaus Mi-chael Grüber.

WINSTON CHURCHILL AND THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND (Giacometti Room)Portraiture has been a recurrent theme in his work since the 1960s. Eduardo Arroyo’s mocking and critical images have made his portraits, often caricatures, a special genre. His paintings are full of familiar characters and their doubles. The Spanish artist redi-rects the classical genre of self-portraiture and portraiture by showing “real” subjects with “false” features, “false” faces, pre-ferring “masks” showing the inside of the characters with psychological or historical representations. Fictitious or real charac-ters, famous or anonymous, Eduardo Arroyo orchestrates a true role play of masks and disguises. In his theatrical and metaphorical staging, we find many historical figures (the Queen of England, Cleopatra, Napoleon...). There are politicians like Winston Churchill shown sitting with his back to us with his recognizable, imposing stature. He is in a

painter’s position in his chair accompanied by ceramics which evoke the ingredients and the palette of Winston Churchill the art-ist. To attack the “grotesque” of our time, he takes pleasure in presenting emptiness as in Le Meilleur cheval du monde, an equestrian portrait of Elizabeth II made anonymous by “devouring” the face with paint.

SAINT BERNARDAND THE PONT D’ARCOLE (Giacometti Room)The Spanish artist has also desecrated a few well-known personalities. His rep-resentations of them are totally free which give double meanings to the interpreta-tions of Napoléon Bonaparte or the Pont d’Arcole series. Napoléon Bonaparte, the victor in the Battle of Arcola and repre-sented heroically in all history textbooks is caricatured by Arroyo through anamorphic shapes. Here, there is the stereotypical im-age of the victor.

SCULPTURES(Giacometti Room)The Foundation presents a set of bronze sculptures and unique pieces made of var-ious materials that give a comprehensive look at a part of Eduardo Arroyo’s work that is not well known in France. As if in a delusion, this set of sculptures give rise to games, dreams and many characters who, by association, are part of the imag-inary theatre of Eduardo Arroyo: Mickey and Donald, the Lady of Baza, the Princess of the Ursines, Frida Kahlo, but also amazing hybrid characters like Dante-Cyrano de Bergerac, Tolstoy-Bécassine, just until the last sculpture of the exhibition in the atri-um, Unicornio de Laciana, a disturbing bestiale creature which expresses both the bull and the monsters Goya dreamed to see disappear at dawn.

Page 5: BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • … · gle painting based on La Ronde de nuit by Rembrandt and creates his first reliefs in rubber. January 1977 First solo

1937Birth of Eduardo Arroyo in Madrid on Feb-ruary 26, during the Spanish Civil War. After primary and secondary studies at the Lycée français and then at the Instituto de Nuestra Señora de la Almudena, he enters Journal-ism School.

1958Goes into exile in Paris. He arrives there with the intention of being a journalist, but soon decides to paint.

1959Meets gallerist Georges Detais.

1960Participates in the Salon de la jeune pein-ture, refuses artistic dogmas as much as arbitrary politics.

1963 Presents L’abattoir at the third Paris Bien-nial conceived in collaboration with Biass, Brusse, Camacho, Pinoncelli and Zlotykam-ien.

1965Becomes one of the main actors of the “Narrative Figuration” movement after his participation in the exhibition of the same name in October 1965. Exhibition presented at the Creuze gallery in Paris and organized by critic Gérald Gassiot-Talabots where the collective work (a series of eight paintings) Vivre et laisser mourir ou la fin tragique de Marcel Duchamp by Allaud, Arroyo and Re-calcati creates a scandal.

1967March: Exhibition “Aillaud, Arroyo, Recalcati” at the Galleria Mendoza, Caracas. The three artists travel to Venezuela, Mexico and New York.April: Participates in the exhibition “Bande dessinée et figuration narrative” held at the Musée des Arts Décoratif, Paris.September: 5th Paris Biennial.November: Exhibition, «Eduardo Arroyo, Miró refait ou les malheurs de la coexistence» at the Galleria Il Fante di Spada, Rome.

1968May: Participates in the May 1968 demon-strations in Paris and produces political posters in the “atelier populaire” at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.July: Settles in Milan.

1969Creates the stage sets for Offlimits present-

ed at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan. It is the first of a long series of collaborations with the director Klaus Michael Grüber.December: Exhibition, “Sur le thème de Churchill peintre” at the Galerie Withofs, Brussels.

1970Lives in Rome until September.October: Exhibition, “30 anni dopo” present-ed at the Galleria Arte Borgogna in Milan on Franco’s Spain and in 1971 at the Arc, Paris and at the Frankfurter Kunstverein.

1971Voyage to New York. Meets Saül Steinberg.

1973Meets Karl Flinker.Returns to Paris and sets up at La Ruche.Release of Il poi viene prima (Milan: Feltr-inelli) published in French in 1974 under the title Trente-cinq ans après (Christian Bourgois).February: Exhibition “Opere operette” at the Galleria Arte Borgogna, Milan where the boxer series called La forza del destino is presented.

October 1974 Arrested in Spain where he was preparing the Venice Biennale. Deported in November. France grants him political refugee status.

1975-76Moves to West Berlin at the invitation of DAAD, the Academy of Fine Arts, for a nine-month residence. Works on one sin-gle painting based on La Ronde de nuit by Rembrandt and creates his first reliefs in rubber.

January 1977 First solo exhibition in Spain since 1963, Galerie Maeght, Barcelona.

April 1977 «Mythologies quotidiennes II», group exhi-bition at the A.R.C., Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris.

June 1978Participates in Documenta 6 in Kassel.

1980“Ramoneurs”, solo exhibition at the Galerie Maeght, Zürich.

1982Retrospective “Eduardo Arroyo, 1962-1982, 20 years of painting,” Salas Ruiz Pi-casso, Madrid; Centre Georges Pompidou,

Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris. Arroyo has never given up on writing. He is the author of the Panama Al Brown biog-raphy which is extension of his interest in boxing, as is manifest in his painting.

1984Solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Muse-um, New York.

1986Premiere of his play Bantam at the Residenz Theater in Berlin, directed by K.M. Grüber.Exhibition in Madrid, Fundación Santillana where the Madrid-Paris-Madrid series is presented.

1988May: Exhibition “Berlin, Tangier, Marseilles” at the Musée Cantini, Marseille.October: Exhibition “Arroyo Malakoff” at the Galerie de France, Paris, where the Carmen Amaya series is presented.

1989Publication of Sardines à l’huile (by Plon), an anthology of texts by Arroyo.

1993“Grandeur nature” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao where only large scale paint-ings are exhibited.

1995Represents Spain along with sculptor An-dreu Alfaro at the 46th Venice Biennale.

1997Along with his paintings devoted to boxing, the Olympic Museum in Lausanne exhibits Suite Senefelder and Co, a tribute to Aloys Senefelder made up of 102 prints created from old abandoned lithographic stones from several European workshops.

1998The Museo Nacional Centro Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid organizes the first retrospective exhibition of his work in Spain.

1999Galerie Louis Carré & Cie presents “Chap-itres”, its first exhibition of Eduardo Arroyo’s work which includes Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien and Le Jour que Richard Lind-ner est mort. Creates the sets for Tristan & Isolde, directed by K.M. Gruber, Salzburg Festival.

2003Second exhibition at the Galerie Louis Car-ré & Cie presenting painted canvases. The

travelling exhibition of Spanish art abroad begins showing his work in Hungary and throughout 2004 in Romania, Russia and Luxembourg.

2004His book Dans des cimetières sans gloire – Goya, Benjamin, Byron-boxeur, which has been published in French by the Grasset publishing house.Writing and drawing come together for Edu-ardo Arroyo. He illustrates writings which interest him such as “Oraisons funèbres” by André Malraux, the works of Juan Goyti-solo, Ulysses by James Joyce and the Bible in two volumes with 200 illustrations, pub-lished by Círculo de Lectores.

2005-2006The Galerie Louis Carré & Cie presents a selection of drawings from 45 years of work that once again demonstrates the effec-tiveness of his technique. That same year, the Cervantes Institute organizes a traveling exhibition until 2006 in four of its European centers, 50 portraits of writers created with different techniques.Since 1969, Arroyo has continued to work on set design, especially with Klaus Michael Grüber. In 2005, they work on the revival of ”De la maison des morts” by Leos Janácek at the Opera Bastille in Paris and at the Te-atro Real in Madrid, “Doktor Faust” by Buso-ni at the Opernhaus in Zürich in 2006, while that same year, they stage Boris Godunov by Mussorgsky at La Monnaie Theater in Brussels, then in Strasbourg, Mulhouse and Madrid the following year.

2007Exhibition «Correspondances» at the Galerie Louis Carré & Cie showing paintings that make up a vibrant tribute to Fernand Léger.

2008IVAM Valencia exhibition of large scale can-vases and sculptures, mainly of stone and iron, created over the last decade.

2009-2010Taurus Madrid and Círculo de Lectores Barcelona publish “Minuta de un testamen-to”, autobiographical memoirs mixed with observations, comments and sometimes nostalgic, often sarcastic anecdotes which target conventions and other conformism of our contemporary society, especially the pervasive and stifling cultural bureaucracy

which Arroyo treats with his most caustic drawings. The French translation of this literary testament of autobiographical wan-derings was published in 2010 by Editions Grasset under the title “Minutes d’un tes-tament”.

2012 Together with the exhibition “Bazar” show-ing illustrated books, scenographic objects, limited editions and unique works, the Cír-culo de Bellas Artes in Madrid produces a 24-hour black and white film called “Ex-posición individual” showing a long dia-logue filmed between the artist and Alberto Anaut, founder of the PHotoEspaña pho-tography festival. The polyptych from the Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, the oil paint-ing by Van Eyck brothers in the first half of the fifteenth century, speaks so strongly to Eduardo Arroyo that he interprets the altar-piece L’Adoration de l’agneau mystique in graphite pencil on sheets of paper with the exact same dimensions of the original ten wooden panels. Made between 2008 and 2009, this transposition in black and white was exhibited in Barcelona and the Muse-um of Fine Arts in Besançon. In July-Sep-tember 2012 it is shown at the Prado mu-seum which presents it in a room recreating the atmosphere of a chapel and accompa-nied by La Fontaine de la grâce from the Van Eyck school as another contemporary counterpoint to the polyptych. This unique work was the subject of a book co-edited by Maeght publishers and the Prado. Eduardo Arroyo clearly asserts his obses-sion for drawing and the place he gives it feeds as much his painting as it does all of his work on paper.He then works with digital print at Bordas Studio where in 2012 he produces the sec-ond volume of “Dictionnaire impossible”. It differs from the first in its technique and its size as well as the number of definitions (In 1997, Eduardo Arroyo makes a series of lithographies for the first fifty entries for the Larousse dictionary).

2013In February and June, the Fundación Juan March in Palma de Mallorca and the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca pres-ent large sculptures “tattooed” in ceramic started in 2010 as well as portraits paint-ed in oil and photographic collages coming

from the long encounter Eduardo Arroyo has with this medium. The exhibition is called “Eduardo Arroyo: Retratos y retratos”.Recalling Eduardo Arroyo strong interest for drawing, Galeria Álvaro Alcázar in Madrid presents, in November 2013, an anthologi-cal exhibition of color pencils on paper.

2014Exhibition at the Galerie Louis Carré & Cie. Arroyo says, “Painting speaks. With some thirty paintings created over the two years before this ninth exhibition in the Parisian gallery, the perpetual back and forth between Paris and Ma-drid, the memories and far away looks resurface.”Exhibition of a selection of portraits, 30 etchings and lithographs from 1990 to 2000: “Rastros / Rostros en la obra gráfica Eduardo Arroyo” at the Cervantes Institute in Tokyo.For its re-opening, the Musée Estrine in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence inaugurated its new spaces by dedicating its first exhi-bition to Eduardo Arroyo, called “La Nuit espagnole”, in a tribute to the well-known work by Francis Picabia.

2015«La force du destin» Hôtel des Arts, Toulon, retraces his entire career since the 1960sEduardo Arroyo and Fabienne Di Rocco or-ganize an exhibition on the relationship be-tween literature and painting, “L’atelier de Saint Jérôme” at Casa del Lector, Matadero Madrid.

2016Exhibition»La Suite Senefelder & Co de Eduardo Arroyo visita el despacho de Ramón Gómez de la Serna,» Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Sala Despacho Ramón de Gómez de la Serna, Madrid. Comprehensive exhibition of the series, 102 prints made from 1993 to 1996 dedicated to Aloys Senefelder the inventor of lithography.

2017For the year of the artist’s 80th birthday, the Fondation Maeght presents “Dans le respect des traditions,” a thematic exhibi-tion of works produced since 1964 includ-ing well-known paintings as well as those never before seen and a series of paintings created especially for this exhibition.

The Fondation Maeght presents a thematic exhibition of works produced since 1964, made up of well-known paintings as well as those never before seen including a series of paintings created especially for this exhibition. There are also many drawings and a collection of sculptures. The arrangement of the works features small theaters around such paintings as the Agneau Mystique or Paradis des mouches, kingdom of the vanities.

“I am just a painter who does a lot of things, who goes from writing to poetry, from sculpture to sce-nography, to get back to painting, and to paint with more force.”

Eduardo Arroyo, painter, illustrator, sculptor, looks for an appropriate language for each situation. He has remarkable attention to detail, incredible technical skill and a fantasy that is vital. His deliberate eclecticism drives him to use all the materials that are capable of translating his world. He works with graphic design, printmaking, sculpture as well as ceramic or the assembly of various materials to return to oils and canvas with a constantly renewed energy.

“Painting is somehow literary; and it is in this sense that I work on themes. There is a beginning, an end, characters, and the ambiguity specific to novels. It is therefore a story, as if I had written about fifteen novels... “, explains Eduardo Arroyo.

EDUARDO ARROYO Dans le respect des traditions

July 1 - November 19, 2017Exhibition guide

• BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY •

Page 6: BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • BIOGRAPHY • … · gle painting based on La Ronde de nuit by Rembrandt and creates his first reliefs in rubber. January 1977 First solo

1937Birth of Eduardo Arroyo in Madrid on Feb-ruary 26, during the Spanish Civil War. After primary and secondary studies at the Lycée français and then at the Instituto de Nuestra Señora de la Almudena, he enters Journal-ism School.

1958Goes into exile in Paris. He arrives there with the intention of being a journalist, but soon decides to paint.

1959Meets gallerist Georges Detais.

1960Participates in the Salon de la jeune pein-ture, refuses artistic dogmas as much as arbitrary politics.

1963 Presents L’abattoir at the third Paris Bien-nial conceived in collaboration with Biass, Brusse, Camacho, Pinoncelli and Zlotykam-ien.

1965Becomes one of the main actors of the “Narrative Figuration” movement after his participation in the exhibition of the same name in October 1965. Exhibition presented at the Creuze gallery in Paris and organized by critic Gérald Gassiot-Talabots where the collective work (a series of eight paintings) Vivre et laisser mourir ou la fin tragique de Marcel Duchamp by Allaud, Arroyo and Re-calcati creates a scandal.

1967March: Exhibition “Aillaud, Arroyo, Recalcati” at the Galleria Mendoza, Caracas. The three artists travel to Venezuela, Mexico and New York.April: Participates in the exhibition “Bande dessinée et figuration narrative” held at the Musée des Arts Décoratif, Paris.September: 5th Paris Biennial.November: Exhibition, «Eduardo Arroyo, Miró refait ou les malheurs de la coexistence» at the Galleria Il Fante di Spada, Rome.

1968May: Participates in the May 1968 demon-strations in Paris and produces political posters in the “atelier populaire” at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.July: Settles in Milan.

1969Creates the stage sets for Offlimits present-

ed at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan. It is the first of a long series of collaborations with the director Klaus Michael Grüber.December: Exhibition, “Sur le thème de Churchill peintre” at the Galerie Withofs, Brussels.

1970Lives in Rome until September.October: Exhibition, “30 anni dopo” present-ed at the Galleria Arte Borgogna in Milan on Franco’s Spain and in 1971 at the Arc, Paris and at the Frankfurter Kunstverein.

1971Voyage to New York. Meets Saül Steinberg.

1973Meets Karl Flinker.Returns to Paris and sets up at La Ruche.Release of Il poi viene prima (Milan: Feltr-inelli) published in French in 1974 under the title Trente-cinq ans après (Christian Bourgois).February: Exhibition “Opere operette” at the Galleria Arte Borgogna, Milan where the boxer series called La forza del destino is presented.

October 1974 Arrested in Spain where he was preparing the Venice Biennale. Deported in November. France grants him political refugee status.

1975-76Moves to West Berlin at the invitation of DAAD, the Academy of Fine Arts, for a nine-month residence. Works on one sin-gle painting based on La Ronde de nuit by Rembrandt and creates his first reliefs in rubber.

January 1977 First solo exhibition in Spain since 1963, Galerie Maeght, Barcelona.

April 1977 «Mythologies quotidiennes II», group exhi-bition at the A.R.C., Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris.

June 1978Participates in Documenta 6 in Kassel.

1980“Ramoneurs”, solo exhibition at the Galerie Maeght, Zürich.

1982Retrospective “Eduardo Arroyo, 1962-1982, 20 years of painting,” Salas Ruiz Pi-casso, Madrid; Centre Georges Pompidou,

Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris. Arroyo has never given up on writing. He is the author of the Panama Al Brown biog-raphy which is extension of his interest in boxing, as is manifest in his painting.

1984Solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Muse-um, New York.

1986Premiere of his play Bantam at the Residenz Theater in Berlin, directed by K.M. Grüber.Exhibition in Madrid, Fundación Santillana where the Madrid-Paris-Madrid series is presented.

1988May: Exhibition “Berlin, Tangier, Marseilles” at the Musée Cantini, Marseille.October: Exhibition “Arroyo Malakoff” at the Galerie de France, Paris, where the Carmen Amaya series is presented.

1989Publication of Sardines à l’huile (by Plon), an anthology of texts by Arroyo.

1993“Grandeur nature” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao where only large scale paint-ings are exhibited.

1995Represents Spain along with sculptor An-dreu Alfaro at the 46th Venice Biennale.

1997Along with his paintings devoted to boxing, the Olympic Museum in Lausanne exhibits Suite Senefelder and Co, a tribute to Aloys Senefelder made up of 102 prints created from old abandoned lithographic stones from several European workshops.

1998The Museo Nacional Centro Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid organizes the first retrospective exhibition of his work in Spain.

1999Galerie Louis Carré & Cie presents “Chap-itres”, its first exhibition of Eduardo Arroyo’s work which includes Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien and Le Jour que Richard Lind-ner est mort. Creates the sets for Tristan & Isolde, directed by K.M. Gruber, Salzburg Festival.

2003Second exhibition at the Galerie Louis Car-ré & Cie presenting painted canvases. The

travelling exhibition of Spanish art abroad begins showing his work in Hungary and throughout 2004 in Romania, Russia and Luxembourg.

2004His book Dans des cimetières sans gloire – Goya, Benjamin, Byron-boxeur, which has been published in French by the Grasset publishing house.Writing and drawing come together for Edu-ardo Arroyo. He illustrates writings which interest him such as “Oraisons funèbres” by André Malraux, the works of Juan Goyti-solo, Ulysses by James Joyce and the Bible in two volumes with 200 illustrations, pub-lished by Círculo de Lectores.

2005-2006The Galerie Louis Carré & Cie presents a selection of drawings from 45 years of work that once again demonstrates the effec-tiveness of his technique. That same year, the Cervantes Institute organizes a traveling exhibition until 2006 in four of its European centers, 50 portraits of writers created with different techniques.Since 1969, Arroyo has continued to work on set design, especially with Klaus Michael Grüber. In 2005, they work on the revival of ”De la maison des morts” by Leos Janácek at the Opera Bastille in Paris and at the Te-atro Real in Madrid, “Doktor Faust” by Buso-ni at the Opernhaus in Zürich in 2006, while that same year, they stage Boris Godunov by Mussorgsky at La Monnaie Theater in Brussels, then in Strasbourg, Mulhouse and Madrid the following year.

2007Exhibition «Correspondances» at the Galerie Louis Carré & Cie showing paintings that make up a vibrant tribute to Fernand Léger.

2008IVAM Valencia exhibition of large scale can-vases and sculptures, mainly of stone and iron, created over the last decade.

2009-2010Taurus Madrid and Círculo de Lectores Barcelona publish “Minuta de un testamen-to”, autobiographical memoirs mixed with observations, comments and sometimes nostalgic, often sarcastic anecdotes which target conventions and other conformism of our contemporary society, especially the pervasive and stifling cultural bureaucracy

which Arroyo treats with his most caustic drawings. The French translation of this literary testament of autobiographical wan-derings was published in 2010 by Editions Grasset under the title “Minutes d’un tes-tament”.

2012 Together with the exhibition “Bazar” show-ing illustrated books, scenographic objects, limited editions and unique works, the Cír-culo de Bellas Artes in Madrid produces a 24-hour black and white film called “Ex-posición individual” showing a long dia-logue filmed between the artist and Alberto Anaut, founder of the PHotoEspaña pho-tography festival. The polyptych from the Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, the oil paint-ing by Van Eyck brothers in the first half of the fifteenth century, speaks so strongly to Eduardo Arroyo that he interprets the altar-piece L’Adoration de l’agneau mystique in graphite pencil on sheets of paper with the exact same dimensions of the original ten wooden panels. Made between 2008 and 2009, this transposition in black and white was exhibited in Barcelona and the Muse-um of Fine Arts in Besançon. In July-Sep-tember 2012 it is shown at the Prado mu-seum which presents it in a room recreating the atmosphere of a chapel and accompa-nied by La Fontaine de la grâce from the Van Eyck school as another contemporary counterpoint to the polyptych. This unique work was the subject of a book co-edited by Maeght publishers and the Prado. Eduardo Arroyo clearly asserts his obses-sion for drawing and the place he gives it feeds as much his painting as it does all of his work on paper.He then works with digital print at Bordas Studio where in 2012 he produces the sec-ond volume of “Dictionnaire impossible”. It differs from the first in its technique and its size as well as the number of definitions (In 1997, Eduardo Arroyo makes a series of lithographies for the first fifty entries for the Larousse dictionary).

2013In February and June, the Fundación Juan March in Palma de Mallorca and the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca pres-ent large sculptures “tattooed” in ceramic started in 2010 as well as portraits paint-ed in oil and photographic collages coming

from the long encounter Eduardo Arroyo has with this medium. The exhibition is called “Eduardo Arroyo: Retratos y retratos”.Recalling Eduardo Arroyo strong interest for drawing, Galeria Álvaro Alcázar in Madrid presents, in November 2013, an anthologi-cal exhibition of color pencils on paper.

2014Exhibition at the Galerie Louis Carré & Cie. Arroyo says, “Painting speaks. With some thirty paintings created over the two years before this ninth exhibition in the Parisian gallery, the perpetual back and forth between Paris and Ma-drid, the memories and far away looks resurface.”Exhibition of a selection of portraits, 30 etchings and lithographs from 1990 to 2000: “Rastros / Rostros en la obra gráfica Eduardo Arroyo” at the Cervantes Institute in Tokyo.For its re-opening, the Musée Estrine in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence inaugurated its new spaces by dedicating its first exhi-bition to Eduardo Arroyo, called “La Nuit espagnole”, in a tribute to the well-known work by Francis Picabia.

2015«La force du destin» Hôtel des Arts, Toulon, retraces his entire career since the 1960sEduardo Arroyo and Fabienne Di Rocco or-ganize an exhibition on the relationship be-tween literature and painting, “L’atelier de Saint Jérôme” at Casa del Lector, Matadero Madrid.

2016Exhibition»La Suite Senefelder & Co de Eduardo Arroyo visita el despacho de Ramón Gómez de la Serna,» Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Sala Despacho Ramón de Gómez de la Serna, Madrid. Comprehensive exhibition of the series, 102 prints made from 1993 to 1996 dedicated to Aloys Senefelder the inventor of lithography.

2017For the year of the artist’s 80th birthday, the Fondation Maeght presents “Dans le respect des traditions,” a thematic exhibi-tion of works produced since 1964 includ-ing well-known paintings as well as those never before seen and a series of paintings created especially for this exhibition.

The Fondation Maeght presents a thematic exhibition of works produced since 1964, made up of well-known paintings as well as those never before seen including a series of paintings created especially for this exhibition. There are also many drawings and a collection of sculptures. The arrangement of the works features small theaters around such paintings as the Agneau Mystique or Paradis des mouches, kingdom of the vanities.

“I am just a painter who does a lot of things, who goes from writing to poetry, from sculpture to sce-nography, to get back to painting, and to paint with more force.”

Eduardo Arroyo, painter, illustrator, sculptor, looks for an appropriate language for each situation. He has remarkable attention to detail, incredible technical skill and a fantasy that is vital. His deliberate eclecticism drives him to use all the materials that are capable of translating his world. He works with graphic design, printmaking, sculpture as well as ceramic or the assembly of various materials to return to oils and canvas with a constantly renewed energy.

“Painting is somehow literary; and it is in this sense that I work on themes. There is a beginning, an end, characters, and the ambiguity specific to novels. It is therefore a story, as if I had written about fifteen novels... “, explains Eduardo Arroyo.

EDUARDO ARROYO Dans le respect des traditions

July 1 - November 19, 2017Exhibition guide

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