Carmen Laffón. Variations

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza is presenting a major exhibition devoted to the Sevillian painter and sculptor Carmen Laffón (1934-2021), the second woman to be admitted as a full member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. The exhibition revolves around the artist’s unique figurative world and presents the central ideas and motifs in her compositions, which recur as variations and series throughout her more than sixty-year career. Carmen Laffón. Variations features 77 works, including oil paintings, charcoal drawings and sculptures. They are organised into nine sections centred on the artist’s most frequent iconographies—the doll Marcelina, the cot, baskets, cupboards, the Doñana National Park (El Coto), vineyards, whitewash and salt marshes—and establish a dialogue between early and late works. At the start of her career Laffón depicted objects and landscapes from a realistic perspective but as her work evolved she became more interested in painting itself rather than in what it represented, almost reaching abstraction. The artist created her compositions using glazes and diffused areas of paint. Imbued with poetry and feeling, her work remains difficult to categorise. This solo exhibition, the first major retrospective devoted to Carmen Laffón since her death in late 2021, focuses on still life and landscape, the two key genres within her extensive output, produced between 1956 and 2021. Laffón’s interiors are filled with everyday objects such as baskets, sewing machines and cupboards, while her exteriors relate to her life in Seville and Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Cádiz) and depict rooftops, cityscapes and landscapes. She often produced variations on these subjects using charcoal, tempera and oil, and from the mid-1990s onward also made sculptures. In this later period her work reveals greater freedom, with series on new themes such as El Coto, the vineyard, whitewash and salt flats, which she depicted in large formats.