Opening hours: Friday from 4 pm to 10 pm, Saturday from 10 am to 10 pm and Sunday from 10 am to 4 pm
A holistic view of the author
You always go back to where you were happy. This may be one of your conclusions after visiting Eduardo Arroyo and Robles de Laciana. Round tripan exhibition dedicated to the figure of the genuine artist of international prestige. It is a sequential story built around four narrative scenes that synthetically articulate the life and work of Eduardo Arroyo in a fluid and direct dialogue with the viewer.
The proposal is made up of a group of 176 unique works by the artist, 149 belonging to his family's private collection, some of which are unpublished, and 27 from the funds of the Lions Institute of Culture. Leonese Institute of Culture. Among them are sketches and drawings, mixed media plastic exercises, collages, paintings, prints published with the most diverse techniques he used, highlighting the lithography, books, sculptures in bronze, stone, ceramics or several pieces that served for scenographic decorations. This extensive compendium provides a broad and structural vision of the different techniques and creative procedures he used throughout his artistic career, showing us a simple but clear vision of his different evolutionary stages within what has come to be called narrative figuration.
The four blocks are related by means of threads that connect one block to another through works that serve as bridges and transit points. From the influence of Robles de Laciana and his remembrance through works that emulate local nature and culture to the consolidation of his painting as a political and critical weapon during his exile in Paris. From his return to Spain with the plastic reinterpretation of several characters of the Spanish popular culture to the establishment in the family home in Robles de Laciana until his death, a place whose materials and landscapes he integrated in his last works.
The artist
Eduardo Juan González Rodríguez, known by his artistic name Eduardo Arroyo (1937-2018), was born into a family from León in Madrid during the Civil War. The artist spent his childhood summers in the town of Robles de Laciana, in Villablino (León), where his grandfather, who was educated at the Sierra Pambley Foundation of the Institución de Libre Enseñanza, was from. As a student at the Lycée Français, as a teenager he took up boxing and painting as his main passions.
After studying journalism and after completing his military service, in 1958 he exiled himself to Paris because of his rejection of Franco's regime. There he settled in the Montparnasse district, where he came into contact with the different artistic currents that claimed the narrative figuration as a weapon of political and social criticism. In 1960 he participated in the Salon de la Joven Pintura with La corrida de la mariposa and during the III Biennial of Paris, he presented Los cuatro dictadores, a work that caused a diplomatic scandal and was later censored in Spain. Humor and irony were always part of his eclectic work.
In 1976 he returns from exile and rehabilitates the family home in Robles de Laciana. Here, together with Jonás Pérez and Lolo Zapico, he created painting, drawing and sculpture workshops and developed the bulk of his lithographic work, through dreamlike characters such as El unicornio or Las novias de Muxiven. In 1982, the Government of Spain awarded him the National Prize for Plastic Arts. His last work was the illustrations of the original text of James Joyce's Ulysses. Arroyo died on October 14, 2018 in Madrid and rests today in the civil cemetery of Robles de Laciana.
