Laurence Dollimore
MORE than 40 works by famed Galician artist Francisco Leiro have gone on display in Malaga.
Leiro was part of the Surrealist group Foga in the 1970s and held his first solo exhibition at the Cultural Society of Cambados in 1975, at the young age of 18.
At the end of the 1980s he moved to New York where he focused on abstract art.
Now, three decades later, his latest exhibition, featuring huge human-like statues, tackles with wars, disasters and violence.
The works ‘Requiem’ (2005), ‘Operario’ (2009), and ‘Aleppo’ (2016) place the viewers inside moments from different massacres and wars.
For the curator of the exhibition, Fernando Frances, Leiro ‘is clearly one of the firm examples of when art is a commitment to living.’
“Leiro commits himself to retelling the massacres, the injustices, the murders, the excessive violence in the world and transfers these stories to his sculptures,” he said.
But local stories are also reimagined, with statues of builders tying their shoelaces and pieces like ‘Supervisor and three haulers’.
The ‘Leiro’ exhibition is on show now at the Center of Contemporary Art of Malaga, CAC, until January 7, 2018.
