Museo Carmen Thyssen

Comprising nine works by the painter Luis Feito (1929-2021) produced between 1956 and 1962, this exhibition focuses on a particularly decisive period, both in his individual creative career and in the opening up of Spanish art to a new avant-garde in which abstraction introduced a radical break with what had come before.

In those years, Feito took part in the founding of the El Paso group, created in 1957 and a pioneer in Informalism in Spain, and together with the rest of its members he had a wide international influence, contributing to the creation of a renewed and daring artistic environment. To this period belong his more materic canvases – done in ochre, black and white – in which the centre of attention is simply the painting itself, regardless of content and meaning. As Feito himself explained: “I wanted the painting to have a value per se, not to illustrate anything”. Based on these experiments with oils and sand, a gradual formal and aesthetic purification would emerge, including tentative geometric suggestions within a materic chaos which turned to the use of red as early as 1961-1962 and heralded later stages of his long career. 

Thanks to the generous collaboration of his heir, the current selection presents some of the artist’s most personal and appreciated creations, which accompanied him throughout his life and still hang on the walls of his home and studio in Madrid. These pieces reveal the intense struggle of forces in which the painter was caught up in each of his works, conveyed to the canvas in the form of a strong emotional and expressive charge that impresses the viewer and synthesises Luis Feito’s creative impulse.

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Luis Feito, N.º 165, 1960. Óleo y arena sobre lienzo, 199 x 240 cm. Colección del artista. © Luis Feito, VEGAP, Málaga, 2023
Luis Feito, N.º 280, 1962. Óleo y arena sobre lienzo, 114 x 162 cm. Colección del artista. © Luis Feito, VEGAP, Málaga, 2023
Estudio de Luis Feito en Madrid, 2023