Reflections of Pop
17 March - 4 September 2016La forza del destino: Kid Chocolate
1972 Oil on canvas, 195 x 130 cm ‘la Caixa’ Collection of Contemporary Art
Eduardo Arroyo
A successful painter since the 1960s, Arroyo was an enfant terrible of French narrative figuration along with Gilles Aillaud and Antonio Recalcati. During his Paris exile in the 1960s and 1970s, he produced markedly political paintings close to pop art that are a sarcastic, parodic and bitingly critical reflection on various themes: exile, being a painter, clichés of Spanishness and contemporary politics.
His works, complex and laden with meanings, are organised into thematic series and composed from borrowed images, sometimes repeated, paired or multiple, to tell critical, ironic and myth-debunking stories about a variety of subjects. Unlike other pop artists, Arroyo does not seek to eliminate the artist as storyteller, as he even features himself in his paintings.