Artistes plàstiques, visuals i escèniques > Artistes gràfiques
Context de creació femenina
Lita Cabellut is an expressionist portrait painter. She paints oil portraits mainly, which look almost like a photography with a crackle finishing touch on her big canvas. She is the successor of German expressionist artists like Paula Modersohn-Becker or Gabriel Münter; as well as abstract American expressionism of Elaine de Kooning, or expressive realism of American Alice Neel. She is contemporary of British abstract painter Cecily Brow (1969). Cabellut became globally famous after her stunning launch in 2015 when ArtPrice included her in its list of the 500 prized artists in the market.
Ressenya
Lita Cabellut is a Spanish painter who lives and works in the Netherlands. On her large canvas, she uses oil with a crackle paint usually used in fresco painting. She creates mass projects and combines different techniques like drawing on paper, sculpture, poetry, video or scenographies. According to the ArtPrice list, she is the third most prized Spanish artist, and she has displayed exhibitions in museums from around the world in the last decade. She has been questioned due to her gypsy ethnicity and her biography, which placed her as a beggar in the streets of Barcelona until she was adopted by a wealthy Dutch family.
Justificacions
Expressionist painter
Photographic hyperrealism.
Denunciation of violence against women.
Biografia
According to her own website, Lita Cabellut (Spain, 1961) grew up as a street urchin until she was adopted when she was twelve years old. Due to her interest in painting, her adoptive parents took her to know the Spanish masters in the Museo del Prado. After that, she decided to be devoted to her passion immediately: art. When she was 19 years old, she moved to the Netherlands, where she studied in the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, in Amsterdam.
Currently, she is a multidisciplinary Spanish artist settled in the Netherlands, where she has her workshop. Cabellut has become world-wide famous with pictorial series of large scale portraits on canvas, where she uses a contemporary variation of the fresco technique. Beyond her colossal paintings, her work is formed by drawings on paper, sculptures, poetry, visual poems, photographies, installation, and videos. She has also specialised in opera scenography, in designing customized scenes and in audiovisual creation. Her works are imbued with a poetic feeling that guides and incites all these multidisciplinary tools. In series devoted to singular women such as Frida Khalo or Coco Chanel, reviews identify the exaltation of female characters with heartbreaking lives as was her case. Perhaps, cracks that traverse her paintings symbolise human suffering. Her website states that she is known as the third most prized Spanish artist and her works have been displayed in several museums around the world.
Her origins have been questioned, since her sisters' statements disagree with the image of an abandoned child in the streets of Barcelona. She appeared on media in 2015, in an interview to El Confidencial, which built her epic biography "Cabellut, the indigent who became the most prized Spanish artist around the world". The truth is that her first exhibition took place in the Masnou town hall in 1978, before moving to the Netherlands. It seems that her curriculum started in 2008 --the first works of her web are from that date--, although, in reality, it is difficult to contrast data until 2015. It seems that she disappeared from the art world until the moment when she became the most prized Spanish artist around the world according to ArtPrice. However, it is not a much reliable source for many experts on art and on the art market, since the list they make can be manipulated by adding data, which have not been contrasted, from an auction house or a gallery in London or Paris. These lists, though, are usually quite opaque.
Obres
WORKS:
- l Frida, The Black Pearl, 2010. Series of paintings.
- l Coco, The Testimony of Black and White, 2011. Series of paintings, 35 portraits.
- I A Portrait of Human Knowledge, 2012. Series of paintings, 150 portraits of knowledge icons.
- l The Trilogy of the Doubt, 2013. Painting Triptychs, social topics (power, justice).
- l The Black Tulip, 2014. Series of paintings, national topics of the Netherlands.
- l Blind Mirror, 2015. Series of paintings about culture and religion.
Ortiz de Zárate, Pablo (2015). “Cabellut, la indigente que se convirtió en la artista nacional más cotizada del mundo”. El Confidencial, 31/10/2015 https://www.elconfidencial.com/cultura/2015-10-28/lita-cabellut-arte-cotizada-mundo_1073541/
Ruiz, Nacho (2019). “Lita Cabellut, la gran mentira”, HUFFPOST, 30/10/2019 https://www.huffingtonpost.es/entry/lita-cabellut-la-gran-mentira_es_5db83a49e4b0bd6102517541
