The Thyssen exhibits Carmen Laffón for the first time after her death: “She has gone from a more local context to the world”

Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum opened this Monday ‘Carmen Laffón. Variations’, a great exhibition of the Sevillian painter and sculptor Carmen Laffón, the second woman to enter the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid as a full academician.

“She has been an artist who, from a more local context (more Spanish from Seville, from Madrid), has gone out into the world from very early on, but more and more over the years. And he has been relating his work more and more to the great currents, to the great movements of contemporary art.”explained the artistic director of the art gallery, Guillermo Solana, this Monday at a press conference.

The exhibition – which can be visited until September 27 – revolves around to the “very personal” figurative world of the artist and presents the central ideas or motifs of her compositionswhich are repeated as variations and series throughout his more than sixty-year career, in which he lived between Sanlcar (Cádiz), Seville and Madrid.

The monograph is made up of 77 works organized into 9 themes in which there are oil paintings, charcoals and sculptures that revolve mainly around still life and the landscape. These two genres are fundamental in his extensive work, carried out between 1956 and 2021, the year in which he died. However, Thyssen has focused on its creation since 1992.

Thus, it is the first exhibition to be held after his death – which makes it a “special” exhibition, according to Solana. It was proposed to the Thyssen by its curator, Paula Luengo, who has been visiting “each collector” to lend the works that make up ‘Carmen Laffón. Variations’. The artist’s family is the one who has lent the most pieces.

Laffón began his career representing objects and landscapes from a realistic perspective, but, as he evolved, he became more interested in the painting itself than in what it represented, almost reaching abstraction. Thus, he makes his compositions based on glazes and blurred stains.

“In Carmen’s painting there is this tendency towards the cyclical, to return again and again to the same motifs and to not consider anything finished.“Solana specified.

The nine sections that make up the exhibition are dedicated to its most frequent iconography: the Marcelina doll, the cradle, the baskets, the closets, the Coto de Doñana, the vineyards, the lime and the salt flats.

Specifically, the first chapter of the exhibition is dedicated to the Marcelina doll – her nephew Manuel has revealed that it is a doll that belonged to his friend and also a Sevillian artist Teresa Duclós – and to the theme of the cradle, bringing together two pairs of oil paintings, from 1965 to 1995, that connect with childhood.

The first couple of Marcelinas is part of what could be considered the first series made by Laffón, in the sixties, with a dreamlike atmosphere reminiscent of magical realism, as Luengo explained.

Still lifes also divide the exhibition’s route, a genre that allowed Laffón to experiment with formats and techniques through “objects of modest use”; the objects, present in the early years of his career; or the urban landscape of the two cities in which he lived – Madrid and Seville -.

The Coto de Doñana is the environment in which the artist developed her painting in a more “personal” way. and is the main protagonist in the exhibition with a series of horizontal views in pastel tones.

Of all the works on display, the curator explained that there have been two – ‘The Madrid terrace’ and one of the sewing machines – that have been restored for the exhibition.

Although Solana has assured that dedicating large temporary exhibitions to women artists is “at the heart” of the art gallery, he has specified that Laffón’s case is not “a recovery” of an unknown work, but rather a “recognition” to which the Thyssen “adds itself.”