Antonio Lopez Garcia at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston

I went to see the Antonio Lopez Garcia exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston during my lunchbreak at SMFA yesterday. This exhibition was definitely one of the more unusual exhibitions I’ve seen at the MFA recently. While Lopez Garcia is well known in some circles, he’s not a blockbuster name like Cecily Brown or other contemporary artists who have shown at the MFA in recent years.

The exhibition certainly highlighted how prolific Lopez Garcia is: the works spanned across drawings, sculpture, relief sculpture, and paintings. Overall, what struck me the most was the quiet intimacy and genuine personal investment in his works. These are qualities that I think more often than not usually come across as cliche, overly sentimental, or just fake. I never knew that oil paintings that large (several were at least 10 feet across if not more) could feel so personal and intimate. His painting technique was quite distinctive: the simplicity of his individual brush strokes was well matched with the complexity of his detail work. For me the best painting in the show was a painting of the inside of his refrigerator.

For me, the best pieces in the show were the two graphite drawings of pumpkin and quinces, as well as the sculpted heads of his grandchildren. The pumpkin and quince drawings showed an almost muscular quality to the forms in the vegetables, and yet were subtle and gestural at the same time.The head sculptures were actually quite understated in terms of articulating the form, which is exactly what made them so beautiful. There was one head in particular that was cast in yellow wax which I found particularly poignant for its simplicity. The eyes were barely visible, the nose and the mouth were the only features on the head that emerged from the form.