San Sebastián, Spain, 1939.

Villalba graduated in Fine Arts and was an academic at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where he became a member in 2002. He also won a scholarship to study at Harvard University. At the end of the fifties he moved to Paris and there he worked in André Lhote's workshop where he made numerous paintings.

He was a precursor of the use of photography as painting, emulsified, intervened and transformed, and his work has been recognized by the most important art institutions. After the presentation of his work (presentation of his famous rose encapsulated) at the XXXV Venice Biennale, in 1970, he achieved great recognition for his career. He has received numerous awards such as the International Painting Prize of the XII Sao Paulo Biennial (1973), the National Painting Prize, Spain 1983, or the National Fine Arts Prize (2003).

He has exhibited in numerous European museums: Stadt Museum Bochum, Bochun, Germany; Frankfurter Künstverein, Frankfurt; Künstlerhaus, Vienna; ; Heidelberg Künstverein, Heidelberg; Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark; Sonja Henie-Niels Onstand Foundation, Hovikooden, Norway; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.

He also had numerous individual and collective exhibitions: at the Guggenheim and at the MOMA in the United States, at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris or at the Valencian Institute of Modern Art in Spain, among others.

He died in Madrid in 2018 due to a heart attack. The last years of his life he had to use an oxygen respirator.