Feito, Luis

Luis Feito was born in Madrid in 1929. He is a painter who was part of the El Paso Group and he is considered one of the most important contemporary spanish artists.
Luis Feito started with his artistic career in 1950, when he entered at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. But his well-defined trayectory began with a brief figuative period that was ended when, through a cubist experience, he entered in the abstraction around 1953.
In 1954 Luis Feito made his first solo exhibition of a non-figurative trend at Galería Buchholz and also at Galería Fernando Fe, both of few modern galleries in Madrid. And in 1955 he held his first exhibition in Paris, at Galeria Arnaud, where thereafter Feito would exhibit there during 25 years. In the same year he obtained a scholarship from the French Government and he moved to Paris. It was during this period that he was influenced by the authomatism and, especially, by materic painting, which led him to work with oil paste and sand, within a color palette of white, black and ochre.
After his period living in Paris, when Luis Feito saw that the spanish artistic movement was not evolved he create with other artists and art critics, El Paso Group. This was one of the first avant-garde movements in post-war Spain, which introduced the premisses of informalisme and abstract expressionism.
After the exhibitions held with the El Paso Group and with solo ones in the Venice Biennals of 1958 and 1960, the International recognition came. Around 1962, Luis Feito introduced a fourth color, the red one, which he used in circular structures and motifs. Since 1963 his artworks tended towards a formal and material simplification, with circular motifs. But in the 70s color and geomètric prevailed, culminating the decade in its refined period of white squares. In 1981 he left Paris and he moved to Montreal until 1983, year in which he would establish his residence in New York until the early 90s.