Luis Feito was a pioneer of abstraction in Spanish painting in the early 1950s and a founder member of the informalist-style El Paso group in 1957. In 1950 he enrolled in the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando. Two years later his career as an artist began with a series of works which use linear, figurative motifs that gradually lose touch with reality and turn into games of space on backgrounds in diffuse colours. In 1956 he moved to Paris, where matter became the focus of his work, with magma-like areas blooming from the background of his pictures in blurred corpuscles where light bursts out from the interior of the picture through contrasting blacks, whites, reds, browns and yellows, in works that were entirely informalist. In the 1960s he further developed this style, with a tendency towards simplification in form and material, using predominantly circular motifs. He moved from Paris to Montreal and then to New York in the early 1980s. This marked the start of a new period, with works organised around a web of labyrinthine linear motifs which are oriental in inspiration, after the fashion of mandalas, gradually invaded by crystallised forms. In the decades that followed he returned to a gestural style in equilibrium with geometric brush-strokes in black which he superimposed or interleaved with gestural elements influenced by Japanese calligraphy.
His work has enjoyed a high international profile ever since his first solo exhibition in 1954. He took part in the Venice Biennale in 1960, where he won the David E. Bright Prize. In that same year he was selected for the New Spanish Painting and Sculpture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1960). Anthologies of his works were subsequently staged at the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art (1988) and the Reina Sofía (2002), both in Madrid. His many awards and recognitions include his appointment as an Officier de l´Ordre des Arts et des Lettres ['Officer of the Order of the Arts and Letters'] of France in 1985, Spain's Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts in 1998 and admission to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, also in 1998. In 2000 he won the Award of the Spanish Association of Art Critics and in 2014 the 22nd National Etching Award.
Luis Feito was a pioneer of abstraction in Spanish painting in the early 1950s and a founder member of the informalist-style El Paso group in 1957. In 1950 he enrolled in the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando. Two years later his career as an artist began with a series of works which use linear, figurative motifs that gradually lose touch with reality and turn into games of space on backgrounds in diffuse colours. In 1956 he moved to Paris, where matter became the focus of his work, with magma-like areas blooming from the background of his pictures in blurred corpuscles where light bursts out from the interior of the picture through contrasting blacks, whites, reds, browns and yellows, in works that were entirely informalist. In the 1960s he further developed this style, with a tendency towards simplification in form and material, using predominantly circular motifs. He moved from Paris to Montreal and then to New York in the early 1980s. This marked the start of a new period, with works organised around a web of labyrinthine linear motifs which are oriental in inspiration, after the fashion of mandalas, gradually invaded by crystallised forms. In the decades that followed he returned to a gestural style in equilibrium with geometric brush-strokes in black which he superimposed or interleaved with gestural elements influenced by Japanese calligraphy.
His work has enjoyed a high international profile ever since his first solo exhibition in 1954. He took part in the Venice Biennale in 1960, where he won the David E. Bright Prize. In that same year he was selected for the New Spanish Painting and Sculpture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1960). Anthologies of his works were subsequently staged at the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art (1988) and the Reina Sofía (2002), both in Madrid. His many awards and recognitions include his appointment as an Officier de l´Ordre des Arts et des Lettres ['Officer of the Order of the Arts and Letters'] of France in 1985, Spain's Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts in 1998 and admission to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, also in 1998. In 2000 he won the Award of the Spanish Association of Art Critics and in 2014 the 22nd National Etching Award.