20^th Century Spanish

After learning to work with stone at the School of Arts and Crafts of Santiago de Compostela, Leiro later moved to Madrid, where he attended Sculpture and Drawing courses at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts. He had his first solo show in 1975, at Sociedad Cultural in Cambados, his hometown.

In the late 1980s Leiro moved to New York and in 1990 he presented his work at Marlborough Gallery.

His style has gone through various phases, though always maintaining a bedrock of expressionistic figuration. Thematically speaking, his main references are Galician sculpture, Egyptian and Mesopotamian hieraticism, mannerist and baroque forms and . He creates his work with all sorts of materials including concrete, stone, polyester, vinyl, but above all wood, making the most of its chromatic singularities.

In 2000, the IVAM in Valencia organised a retrospective show of his work, exhibiting a selection of sculptures overviewing his creative evolution from 1987 to that moment.