Iconographic origin and creation process of the Dead Girl (1957) by Antonio López. The relationship of photography and painting under the sign of appropriationism

Abstract

This article proposes a decoding of the painting Dead girl (1957) by Antonio López. A key painting from the fifties that must be approached from various perspectives of interpretation to be fully understood. To this end, this study proposes in its development the analysis of both its iconographic origin and its morphological construction, in order to clarify the different tactics that the artist assumes in his narrative ideological structuring. In this sense, we present a text that evidences, on the one hand, the use of photography by the artist as a source of inspiration for the creation of this piece, treating in depth the appropriation process that López carries out to conceive it –under the parameter of fusion of the photographic with the pictorial as a representative strategy–. Meanwhile, on the other, the clear idealized coexistence of reality and unreality in it is revealed, consequently manifesting itself as an essential painting in the composition of its surrealist period.