Born in Madrid (1937-2018) into a middle-class family. His father, a pharmacist with intense cultural interests, became a fundamental point of reference for him, although he died when Eduardo was only seven years old. From that moment on, his mother and his mother's family will become the essential axis that will mark his life, becoming at the same time the direct and experiential link with León and with the small town of Robles de Laciana, where his grandparents lived and where he currently has a house and a workshop.
He studied at the Lycée Français and graduated in journalism in 1957; he immediately moved to Paris to become a writer, but the discovery of the world of painting occupied his interest.
From the beginning, his work has been deeply critical and vindictive, with an intense social and political commitment. It could be framed in the complex and slippery field of narrative figuration or new figuration, although it is true that his proposals maintain a unique specificity, far from fashions and trends. His work is dense and deeply intellectualised, with a narrative sense of storytelling based on the use of some of the most significant cultural, social and political icons of society.
Eduardo Arroyo was a multifaceted creator and from the 1960s onwards he represented a rupture, a change, the recovery of the piece as a free objectual element and of painting as a manual and creative process. Eduardo went against the tide of his time and even went so far as to symbolically and publicly assassinate the art guru of the time, Marcel Duchamp.
Eduardo Arroyo is internationally renowned and his work has been studied, exhibited and collected by the most important museums in the world.
Image by by Manjeet Bawa at Flickr
