Often hailed as “the greatest realist artist alive,” the impact that master painter Antonio López García has had on realist art today is undeniable. Beneath the man’s mild-mannered warmth and humble charm, exists a real tour-de-force. Artists all over the world have sensed it in his work.
The international group exhibition Atravesando El Ojo (Through the Eye) at the Figure Ground Art Gallery in Seattle (Oct 5 — Nov 30, 2023) traces López’s aesthetic influence on artists in both Spain and the US, many of whom have studied with the master. While the artists in this show have been intensely impacted by his way of seeing, each has taken what they learned from López and applied their own eye to create a vision uniquely their own.
On display is work by Jorge Abbad (Spain), Rocío Cano (Spain), Larine Chung (USA), Adam Cohn (UK/Israel), Irene Cuadrado (Spain), Dean Fisher (USA), Zoey Frank (USA), Christopher Gallego (USA), Paco LaFarga (Spain), Carmen Mansilla (Spain), Eduardo Millán Sañudo (Spain), Josephine Sheridan Robinson (USA), Peter Van Dyck (USA), and Nacho Vergara (Spain).
Dean Fisher, Still Life on Colored Paper, oil on panel, 24x48" — available at Figure Ground Art Gallery
The exhibition has been a dream for a decade now, as artists Dean Fisher and Christopher Gallego considered putting together a show before Fisher proposed the idea to Figure Ground Art Gallery owner Brett Holverstott and myself in NYC last summer. All three of us have a love for López’s work; Fisher and his wife Josephine Sheridan Robinson took a workshop with him in 2018, and I have written about his work in the past.