Luis Gordillo studied Law and Fine Arts in Seville and made his entry into the dynamic of art through music. In 1958 he travelled to Paris, where he came into contact with the most intense movements in European art, particularly Informalism, and became interested in the work of Wols, Jean Dubuffet, Henri Michaux and Jean Fautrier, among others. His first works show the influence of Surrealism and Antoni Tàpies, of expressive automatism and gestural style and then evolve, in the early sixties, towards a figuration marked by both American Pop Art and geometrical normative art. In the sixties he began to use photographic images, retrieved from advertising and the mass media, which in the seventies would include images inspired by comics, printing proofs and photocopies, giving rise to processes in his painting that involve the construction and deconstruction of the image. During the personal crisis he went through in 1969, which led him to give up painting for a time, he produced a series of automatic drawings, a practice he continued with constantly from that time. In the early seventies he exercised a strong influence on the artists who were searching for a form of artistic renewal in figuration and who belonged to the so-called "new Madrid figuration". Since then his influence has been felt with increasing strength on the Spanish scene, due to the capacity for renovation and openness his work has shown. But he has also established contacts and overlaps with some of the outstanding currents of international painting, intuitively and often before the time, especially in the eighties, when his work abandoned the signs of figuration and proposed a more abstract vision. In both the eighties and nineties, the idea of process made a radical appearance in his work, as did the resources of accumulation, construction and superimposition, which opened it wide up. In 1981 he was awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas.