ANTONIO’S WORLD

The Suzanne Geiss Company
76 Grand Street
New York, NY

Antonio’s World, a survey of the work of Antonio Lopez (1943-1987), opened at The Suzanne Geiss Company on September 7, 2012. The exhibition showcased three decades of the artist’s polymathic creative output, including never before seen drawings, photographs, and ephemera. Lopez’s seminal works, which adorned the pages of Vogue, The New York Times, Women’s Wear Daily, and Interview throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, remain a powerful source of inspiration, galvanizing contemporary visual culture through a variety of disciplines including fine art, digital media, and fashion.

Beginning in the 1960’s, Lopez redefined fashion imagery with his portrayal of the “Antonio Girls,” comprised most notably of Pat Cleveland, Jane Forth, Jerry Hall, Grace Jones, and Jessica Lange. His infectiously charismatic persona and Pygmalion’s eye for raw beauty led Antonio, and the equally magnetic art director, Juan Ramos, to discover and transform these aspiring models into paragons of glamour.

 Inspired by his muses, contemporary culture, and a diverse range of historical and artistic movements, Lopez forged a diverse body of work rendered in pencil, ink, charcoal, watercolor, and film. His ability to convey the human form - and the couture that ornamented it with flourish and mastery inspired the creation of drawings, ranging from classical, surrealistic, abstract, pop, and urban. Lopez’s distinctive method, which synthesized dedicated study and intrinsic virtuosity, established him as one of the most influential tastemakers of the age.

 Antonio’s multifaceted approach to his art notoriously seeped into the nightlife persona he cultivated while working with Karl Lagerfeld in Paris from 1969 to the mid 1970’s. The celebrity coterie that surrounded him during his Paris years became the subjects of his drawings and photographs. The iconic Instamatics and Polaroids of Divine, Paloma Picasso, Yves Saint Laurent, among many others remain powerful works of photography and important cultural records of a time of exuberant creative productivity and consumption. By the time Lopez returned to New York City in the late 1970’s, he was a celebrated name inspiring designers such as Norma Kamali and Anna Sui. By the 1980’s, he led commercial campaigns for prestigious brands such as YSL, Valentino, Missoni, and Versace.

Antonio’s World was the first comprehensive exhibition of Lopez’s work in New York since 2001.  The work was displayed in an immersive installation conceptualized by Rafael de Cárdenas.

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