Boimorto, 1950. This year Jesús López García is born into the «de Marcos» family. Known today as Suso de Marcos, he is, among other things, one of the leading contemporary Spanish sculptors.
These short biographical notes were first published on the website of the Armando Cotarelo Valledor state school in Boimorto.
To read them, follow this link.
Suso de Marcos was born in Boimorto (A Coruña) in 1950. His official name is Jesús López García, but the weight of local custom meant that, from childhood, the family nickname «Suso» was followed by «de Marcos», as the artist's family was (and still is) known from long ago.
He grew up in the countryside, in a humble home. His liking for carving soon showed: his father made farm tools out of wood, and his son was curious about it on more than one occasion.
He soon moved to the nearby city of A Coruña, where he combined work in craft workshops with his technical and artistic training at the city's School of Arts and Crafts. Later he moved to Madrid (1973), where, while completing his training at the Escuela Central, he was already working with sculptors such as Pau Paissa, Ortega Bru and Juan de Ávalos. His visits to the Prado Museum and his trips beyond the Pyrenees, to Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, England and France, in search of the latest avant-garde art, were decisive for his artistic training at this time.
In 1975 he began to exhibit, and in 1976 he won the third medal for sculpture at the National Fine Arts Competition in Madrid. He kept travelling abroad, and his work became more and more widely known: Madrid, Paris, A Coruña, Ourense, Segovia, Cuenca, Guadalajara... all welcomed his work with success.
In 1979 he arrived in Málaga to take up the post of assistant in Carving (a subject aimed at the craft training of students) at the School of Applied Arts and Artistic Crafts. His artistic ambitions and creative interests led him to plan the subject of Wood Carving, which would go beyond craft and rest on an artistic purpose. On his own merits, in 1982 he won, by competitive examination, the post of teacher of Artistic Wood Carving at the Málaga school.
Since the year he arrived, Málaga has watched him grow along the two paths his relationship with sculpture has followed. On the one hand, in his commitment to teaching, passing on his artistic interests. On the other, in his own sculpture, divided in turn between free creation and religious works made in response to public demand (let us not forget the religious side of Andalusian culture).
His cultural interests (his exhibitions and works link him to literature, history, painting...), his progress in the use of materials (first wood; then iron and wood; later glass, water, iron, polyester, acrylic, artificial light...), his frequent exhibitions and his academic appointments (he joined the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Telmo in 1986 and the Real Academia Gallega de Bellas Artes in A Coruña in 1991) show his drive to progress and perfect his art, as well as his unquestionable worth as a sculptor.
This look at the life and work of Suso de Marcos would be incomplete without a few final lines on his generosity and his commitment to helping those interested in culture: in 1987 he created the Suso de Marcos Carving Prize, which has been awarded every year since; in June 2001 the first Axudas aos Estudos Suso de Marcos (Suso de Marcos study grants), which help fund the education of the pupils with the greatest cultural interests, were presented at the CPI Armando Cotarelo school in Boimorto.
In 2003 he was appointed corresponding member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de Santa Isabel de Hungría in Seville.