Antonio López, master of realist painting and unanimously considered to be one of the most universal Spanish painters, was born in Tomelloso, Ciudad Real on the 6th January 1939.

Encouraged by his uncle, also a painter, he began to paint at thirteen years of age, although at twelve he was already drawing the prints and copying the reproduction paintings he saw in magazines. Since then until now, working exclusively in visual arts, he has created outstanding work - 170 oils, 200 drawings and some twenty sculptures - which have proved him to be one of the most highly- valued artists in the international art world.

After some years in a religious seminary, in 1949, when his aptitude for painting was already clear, he moved to Madrid and studied at Arts and Crafts School and at the San Fernando Art School, where he would become a teacher of Colour in 1964. Upon finishing his studies he travelled in Italy, Greece and France.

His work, in which there is a certain dose of melancholy and of sadness in the vision, is characterised by a sense of investigation of what reality is. Classified as an ultra-realist painter, Antonio López adds greater knowledge of colour as a real substance, a precise sense of draughtsmanship and, above all, a language of forms which is capable of integrating drawing and colour. He has repeatedly declared himself to be a profound admirer of the work of Velázquez.

He paints very slowly - not long before the time of writing he displayed his work "Madrid-Sur", which he began in 1965 -, due to his need to capture on canvas the infinite sensations which are produced by his contemplation of the object to be drawn. "When you are painting, for example, a street, what you are seeing is so extraordinarily impressive that for me, naturally, it is very, very difficult to get part of it down. That is what makes me take so long. I cannot resolve that whole spectacle quickly."

Many of his paintings are re-touched on various occasions until he considers them to be definitively finished. In his own words, "A work is never finished, but rather it reaches the limit of its own possibilities."

The work of Antonio López has taken part in more than fifty group exhibitions and half a dozen individual exhibitions. The first great retrospective of his work took place in Albacete in 1985, and was followed by other great international shows in Brussels (forming part of the Europalia festival) or New York.

In 1983, he was granted the Gold Medal for Fine Arts and the "Pablo Iglesias" Award. The Menéndez Pelayo International University of Santander paid tribute to him the same year with a collective exhibition of his work, awarding him on that occasion the medal of the said university.

A prestigious representative of Spanish contemporary realism, he has been an exclusive artist of the Marlborough Gallery of New York since 1970. Apart from Tàpies and Chillida, he is the only Spanish artist represented in the Brussels Museum of Modern Art.