Virgilio Villalba was born in Tenerife (Spain), but when he was three years old his family emigrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina.
In the capital of Argentina he studied at the National School of Fine Arts Prilidiano Pueyrredón, the most important artistic study center in the country at that time.
In this academy a group of students emerged, integrated by Tomás Maldonado, Alfredo Hlito and Claudio Girola, who rebelled against academic conservatism, opening up the future confrontations between figurative and abstract art. This nucleus of creators was, during the second half of the 1940s, the founder of Argentine concrete art, an aesthetic movement within abstract art where Villalba will have an outstanding performance. In this sense, the work produced by the artist during the 40s and 50s is an outstanding example of Latin American concrete art.
Like many Latin American intellectuals, Villalba emigrated to Europe in the late 50s, thanks to an Oxford University scholarship, escaping from an Argentine social and political context defined by instability and the loss of fundamental freedoms. After spending one year in UK he establishes his residence in Paris.
During the 1960s, the artist underwent a fundamental change in his artistic production, addressing figurative painting and creating a personal work of extreme originality whrere, in a French context of the rise of Nouveau Réalisme and Narrative Figuration, as well as the international apogee of Pop Art, he represents loneliness, impersonalism, anonymity and alienation suffered by the contemporary individual who lives in large cities.