Antonio V

Antonio Villanueva was born in Toledo in 1940, the city where he spent his childhood and attended secondary school. He had his first contact with painting through the Toledo painter Enrique Vera, with whom he worked as an apprentice, painting his first canvases. Later he moved to Madrid where he graduated in engineering at the School of Telecommunications and once he had finished his studies he worked as an engineer with the sole aim of saving enough money to move to the French capital and become a painter.
In ’62 he arrived in Paris with the firm intention of studying painting; he soon exchanged the theoretical classes at the academy, which he attended for only three days, for the practice of the museums and the streets of the Latin Quarter and Saint Germain de Pres. Settled in the latter district, he lived with a large number of bohemian artists and worked as a draughtsman, illustrator and actor.
He travelled to the Canary Islands where he settled in Lanzarote, where he met César Manrique, with whom he collaborated on various projects. Later he moved to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria where he opened a studio.
He returns to Madrid as an illustrator for “Pueblo”, “Triunfo” and “Informaciones”, where Jeremías, a satirical strip, is born. Encouraged by the comments of his friends, he travelled to Ibiza for the first time in 1968, an island where he discovered a people and way of life that made him believe that it was the ideal place to live and work. He settled in Santa Eulalia del Río and at Sandy’s Bar, a meeting place for a wide variety of artists, he made contact with actors such as Terry Thomas, Susan and Denholm Elliott, Ángela Molina, Diana Rigg…
Nowadays, and apart from his continuous exhibitions in Ibiza and in cities such as Saint Paul de Vence, Vienna, Madrid or Amsterdam, he is still working on various ideas such as the drawing of a daily chronicle of events, the continuation of his sculptures and paintings inspired by Tao, with the idea of putting both projects into books in the near future, as well as a series of paintings inspired by his favourite film noir films.