Olula del Río paints from life: Antonio López and García Ibáñez teach their 10th realism course this week
From 5 to 9 October, the Museo Ibáñez in Olula del Río is hosting the tenth edition of Antonio López and Andrés García Ibáñez’s realism course.
Automatic translation: this article was translated with artificial intelligence from the original in Spanish. Read the original
Olula del Río is once again a meeting point for realism this week. From Monday 5 to Friday 9 October, the Museo Ibáñez is hosting the tenth edition of the Curso de Realismo y Figuración (Realism and Figuration Course) for painters, which, according to the call for applications from the Ibáñez Cosentino Art Foundation, is taught by two leading names in Spanish realism: Antonio López and Olula del Río’s own Andrés García Ibáñez.
Antonio López (Tomelloso, 1936), winner of the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 1985, is one of the great masters of realist painting. Alongside him, the home-grown painter: Andrés García Ibáñez (Olula del Río, 1971), whose career is being reviewed these months by the Bancaja Foundation in Valencia. According to the Ibáñez Cosentino Art Foundation, the exhibition ‘Una mirada al realismo español’ (A look at Spanish realism) brings together close to eighty works there, devotes a section to his artistic relationship with Antonio López himself and can be seen until 10 January.
Five days of working from life
The timetable gives no respite: from Monday to Thursday, painting runs from 10:00 to 14:00 and from 17:00 to 20:00, and on Friday only in the morning, because the closing ceremony takes place in the afternoon. The call offered 30 places and five reserve places, with an enrolment fee of €300 that includes lunch on all five days, and the list of accepted participants published by the Foundation on 9 September contains 41 names.
Last year, as Almería Provincial Council reported at the time, the proposed subjects were still life, the nude, the classical statue, landscape and the garden, although each student could choose their own as long as they painted from life.
Back after the pandemic
This is the second edition since the course returned in 2025, after it was interrupted in 2020 by the pandemic. That return brought together fifty painters from six countries, and over its eight previous editions the course had received more than a thousand applications, from places such as Japan, the United States, Mexico or Ukraine. According to the Provincial Council, 253 artists had passed through it.
“We have come to talk about art, that is why we do this, to talk with them, each one contributing what they feel and what they know”, Antonio López summed up at the time. García Ibáñez went a step further and set out a goal for his home town: “Our intention, over time, is to turn Olula del Río into a centre for the study of painting”.
And it is no small thing for a town in inland Almería to be a fixture for realism, with applications from half the world: proof that culture also has a home in rural Almería.
From elValle Actualidad, we can only celebrate that art still has a studio open in Olula del Río.
