Eduardo Gregorio López Martín

(Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, España, 1903 – Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, España, 1974)

He studied at the Luján Pérez School, where he later became a teacher, a task he also carried out at the Schools of Fine Arts in Caracas, Valencia, and Maracay in Venezuela. He mainly exhibited his work in Spanish and Venezuelan cities He won the First Prize at the Tangiers International Exhibition, the National Sculpture Prize in Venezuela, among other awards for sculpture and ceramics.
«The sculptural myth, so robust, so full, so simply grandiose, fully potentiates in Gregorio the reality from which he starts. And when we find his sculptures telling us about its importance with the simplicity of the human creature, he imposes on us his greatness with the legitimate packaging, on the other hand, of what is natural in the absolute, in the mythical, in that plane in which sculpture has to develop». (Enrique Azcoaga)

(Extracted from the brochure of the I Exhibition)

Eduardo Gregorio López Martín. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria , 1903 – 1974 . After his secondary-education studies, he alternated his career as a nautical engineer with his interest in wood carving, a speciality in which he achieved a great mastery which was recognised from very early on. A few months after its foundation, he entered the Luján Pérez School, where he later became a teacher. In 1947 he left the islands and his commitments and moved to Tossa del Mar, Barcelona. He took part in the October Salon and is selected by the Academia Breve de la Crítica directed by Eugenio d’Ors for its Anthological Exhibition, together with Angel Ferrant and Cristino Mallo. In 1951 he represents Spain at the Tangiers International Week, winning the Prize of Honour. He lived in Tangiers until 1955, when he returned to Barcelona for the III Bienal Hispanoamericana, where he exhibited his work. In 1957, like so many other Canarian artists, he decided to emigrate to Venezuela, where he devoted himself to teaching at the School of Fine Arts of Valencia and Maracay, as well as to ceramics, achieving a mastery of the craft that made him the most important Canarian ceramist in history, a sort of Canarian Llorens Artigas, from whom, moreover, he learned his technique. In 1962, together with his pupils, he received the gold medal at the International Exhibition of Ceramics of Buenos Aires, and in the same year, the silver medal, representing Venezuela at the Exhibition of Contemporary Ceramics in Prague. In Venezuela, he met the constructive-kinetic groups, incorporating colour and geometric rigour into his work, which were absent in his previous production. In 1963, suffering from a heart ailment, he returned to Las Palmas and settled in Ciudad Alta.

(Extracted from the documents of the II Exhibition)