González de la Torre studied law in Madrid, but from an early age he was drawn to painting, attending classes at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. It was his uncle, the painter Eugenio de la Torre Agero, who taught him the fundamentals of painting, with additional encouragement from well-known photographer Alfonso Sánchez.

His first landscapes from the early 1960s are often views of Segovia and Ronda, where his parents were born. In formal terms, the works are close to the landscape paintings of the Madrid School, but there is a certain formal and material expressiveness in his work. During this period, he began to take an interest in scrap yards ('car cemeteries') as an expression of the consumer society. In the late 1960s, he took a step away from this materiality, moving towards a more stripped-down style of painting featuring constellations and deserts, in lighter and more subdued colours, in a quest to bring a certain metaphysical quality to his work. Since the 1950s he has travelled extensively — to Paris in 1956; to Italy in 1960; to Central Europe in 1968; and in the early 1970s, to New York, whose skyscraper-shaped outline he depicted in some of his paintings. In the 1990s, his work began to be imbued with a certain degree of mysticism, in a series of paintings in which he depicted those same desolate landscapes with elements of religious iconography, presented as altars or altarpieces. In the 2000s, he distilled the elements down practically to a sign, frequently adding text as a new compositional element, in a constant search for essentiality and harmony.

He held his first solo exhibition at the Sala Alfil (Madrid, 1958) and later entered relations with the Galleria Il Vaglio in Florence between 1970 and 1973. In 1983, he staged his first retrospective at the Torreón de Lozoya de San Martín in Segovia and in 1997, a traveling exhibition of his work toured several towns in Castilla y León. In 2015, the Joaquín Peinado Museum in Ronda devoted a room to his work, and the following year he held a retrospective there. In 1980, he was made a corresponding academic of the Royal Academy of History and Art of San Quirce in Segovia and in 2000, he was given the freedom of the City of Ronda.

Roberto Díaz