Luis Rodríguez Gordillo was born in the city of Seville in 1934, the son of a middle-class doctor. He studied law, although he did not feel a strong vocation for it, as the artist himself has acknowledged. After completing his law studies, he began studying Fine Arts in the same city. At the end of the 1950s, he moved to Paris, where he came into contact with avant-garde art. He is one of the most singular creators of the Spanish artistic scene of the second half of the 20th century.

His work revolves around different lines of research. He participated in informalism, following in the footsteps of Tàpies, Wols, Dubuffet, and Jean Fautrier, and has also been considered one of the Spanish artists who best interpreted pop art in the 1960s. A part of his work explores the importance of series and repetition as a compositional tool. Gordillo considers that an image subjected to a continuous process of reproduction never reaches a definitive state.

Following his discovery and practice of psychoanalysis, he introduced into his work an interest in meanings and in the relationship between thought, experience, and aesthetic expression. One of his most singular contributions to contemporary art has been the definition of chromatic strategies appropriate to contemporary urban phenomena. In this sense, his work is related to documentary photography and popular cultures linked to graphic design.

His work has been particularly influential on painters such as Guillermo Pérez Villalta, Carlos Franco, and Carlos Alcolea.