Francisco Leiro is one of a group of artists who brought about a change of direction in Spanish art in the early 1980s. The euphoria that surrounded the return to democracy in Spain was manifested in an explosion of art in many forms from artists including Ferran García Sevilla, Juan Muñoz, Manolo Quejido, Susana Solano, Juan Uslé and Miquel Barceló. Leiro soon came to stand out in their company as an artist who was capable of bringing a new style to sculpture, using granite and wood to compose narrative works that were rooted in reality but leaned heavily on literary tradition and popular mythology.
His parents were craftspeople and he showed an early preference for sculpture. He was largely self-taught. His father and grandfather were cabinet-makers, and it was from them that he learned the rudiments of woodworking. From 1974 to 1976 he studied at the Arts and Crafts School in Santiago de Compostela, where he worked in stone. At around that time he joined with other artists to form a surrealist group called FOGA (Fato Ounirista Galego). His work first appeared in public in 1983, at the third and last Atlántica exhibition at the Pazo de Xelmírez estate in Santiago de Compostela. This led to his first solo show at the Montenegro Gallery in Madrid a year later, and to his inclusion in a major joint exhibition called En Tres Dimensiones ['In Three Dimensions'], which led to a boom in sculpture in Spain. In 1985 he represented Spain at the São Paulo Biennial. Since the late 1980s his style has remained clearly defined, with twisted figures and forced compositions, filled with drama and vitality, that are closely aligned with expressionism. Also in the late 1980s he began to obtain major public commissions for monumental sculptures in a number of cities, including Merman at the Puerta del Sol in Vigo (1991) and Astronaut in Valdemoro, Madrid (2001). In 1987 he moved to New York, where he still lives and works, though he also spends time at his workshop in Cambados.
Major exhibitions of his work include a retrospective at the Valencia Institute of Modern Art (Valencia, 2000) and the Centre for Contemporary Art of Galicia (Santiago de Compostela, 2000), an intervention at the Palacio de Cristal venue of the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2004) and an exhibition called Os traballos e os días de Francisco Leiro ['The Works and Times of Francisco Leiro’] at the ABANCA Obra Social venue (Santiago de Compostela, 2016).
Francisco Leiro is one of a group of artists who brought about a change of direction in Spanish art in the early 1980s. The euphoria that surrounded the return to democracy in Spain was manifested in an explosion of art in many forms from artists including Ferran García Sevilla, Juan Muñoz, Manolo Quejido, Susana Solano, Juan Uslé and Miquel Barceló. Leiro soon came to stand out in their company as an artist who was capable of bringing a new style to sculpture, using granite and wood to compose narrative works that were rooted in reality but leaned heavily on literary tradition and popular mythology.
His parents were craftspeople and he showed an early preference for sculpture. He was largely self-taught. His father and grandfather were cabinet-makers, and it was from them that he learned the rudiments of woodworking. From 1974 to 1976 he studied at the Arts and Crafts School in Santiago de Compostela, where he worked in stone. At around that time he joined with other artists to form a surrealist group called FOGA (Fato Ounirista Galego). His work first appeared in public in 1983, at the third and last Atlántica exhibition at the Pazo de Xelmírez estate in Santiago de Compostela. This led to his first solo show at the Montenegro Gallery in Madrid a year later, and to his inclusion in a major joint exhibition called En Tres Dimensiones ['In Three Dimensions'], which led to a boom in sculpture in Spain. In 1985 he represented Spain at the São Paulo Biennial. Since the late 1980s his style has remained clearly defined, with twisted figures and forced compositions, filled with drama and vitality, that are closely aligned with expressionism. Also in the late 1980s he began to obtain major public commissions for monumental sculptures in a number of cities, including Merman at the Puerta del Sol in Vigo (1991) and Astronaut in Valdemoro, Madrid (2001). In 1987 he moved to New York, where he still lives and works, though he also spends time at his workshop in Cambados.
Major exhibitions of his work include a retrospective at the Valencia Institute of Modern Art (Valencia, 2000) and the Centre for Contemporary Art of Galicia (Santiago de Compostela, 2000), an intervention at the Palacio de Cristal venue of the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2004) and an exhibition called Os traballos e os días de Francisco Leiro ['The Works and Times of Francisco Leiro’] at the ABANCA Obra Social venue (Santiago de Compostela, 2016).