López (as he is known) was born in 1936 in the region of La Mancha, the fabled land of Don Quixote where nothing is quite what it seems. His parents were prosperous farmers, and an uncle, artist Antonio López Torres, recognized his extraordinary talents as a child. In 1949, at the age of 13, he was sent to Madrid to prepare for the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, a national art school. There he made the friends of a lifetime among a tightly knit group of like-minded artists, including his future wife, María Moreno. López and his compatriots, who became known as the Madrid Realists, were unimpressed with the international style of Abstract Expressionism but had few models for what a contemporary realism might look like. (López says they were unaware of Edward Hopper, nor do they seem to have known of London-based realists such as Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach.) He experimented with odd juxtapositions and hints of surrealism, as in this mysterious painting of the run-down Atocha neighborhood. As a teenager, he had first entered the city through the train station at Atocha. The sheer urban drabness of Madrid is accentuated with a broad empty belt of gray in the lower third of the painting, above the joyless copulating couple. We aren't quite sure whether this is a celebration of urban vitality or a dream-soaked elegy for a dying city.