20th-21st Century Spanish

After studying at the Law School and at the School of Fine Arts in Seville, Gordillo travelled to Paris in the late 1950s where he discovered the Art Informel movement. This is when he began to engage with derivations of Surrealism such as psychoanalysis and the technique of automatism, the foundations on which the artist would ground his practice. Likewise, he has always maintained a fine balance between subjectivism and staunch individualism, and between international movements, with a special mention for , and the Spanish geometric abstract movement known as Normativismo.

Gordillo’s complex practice has flirted with photographic manipulation, mechanisation and a return to painting, with an increasing presence of popular, visceral and primeval imagery.

In 1981, his career was distinguished with Spain’s National Visual Arts Prize; in 1996 with the Honorary Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts; in 2004 with the Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid Medal; and in 2007 with the Velázquez Visual Arts Award, among other prizes. He was nominated as a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and has an honorary degree from the University of Cuenca.