Lita Cabellut (1961, Spain) is an artist who lives and works in the Netherlands. Over the years, despite being considered one of the most relevant painters, she has developed an ability to mix disciplines that make it easier for the medium not impede to her language.
Cabellut’s working method is based on reflection and detailed study of the selected motif as the main concept that she later develops in her atelier. The pieces she develops on a large scale combine traditional techniques and modern applications. The characters chosen are the communication channel of the concept. Through these characters that act as interlocutors, the human being, the social message, brutality, selfishness, ignorance, dehumanization, or transcendence are the central themes in her work.
Her creative process is visceral and physical, and this is reflected in the texture, gestures, and unvarnished emotional intensity of her pieces. She considers art a capital element for transforming and improving society.
At a very early age, she had the opportunity to discover the great masters at the Prado Museum and it was from that moment on that she discovered the transformative power of art and felt, physically and emotionally, the need to express herself through painting, which led her years later to the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.
It was in the Netherlands that she developed the enormous inspirational power of the great masters: Her unabashed social commitment was due to Francisco de Goya, the gaze of the characters to Velazquez, she sought the light of Vermeer, the flesh tones of Rubens, the vibrant colours of El Greco, the anguish of Rembrandt’s everyday life, the spirituality of Mark Rothko, the materiality of Anselm Kiefer, the rawness of Francis Bacon, or the conceptualism od Joseph Beuys. Artists who appear and disappear in her creative career and in the series that make up her artistic development.
Her works have been exhibited in museums such as the MAC Museum of Contemporary Art (La Coruña), RABASF Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando (Madrid), Vila Casas Foundation (Barcelona) or Goya Museum (Zaragoza) in Spain; Pivot Centre for Art + Culture (Seattle) in the USA USA; Seoul Arts Center in Korea; Contemporary Art Museum (Sicily) in Italy; CSMVS The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (Mumbai) in India; Hälsingland Museum (Hudiksvall) in Sweden; YUZ Museum (Shanghai), Shanlight Art Museum (Guiyang) in China; the Museum Jan (Amstelveen) or Het Noordbrabants Museum (Den Bosch) in the Netherlands.
Her works are in the permanent collections of the MacS, Museo Arte Contemporáneo Sicilia; RAK Art Foundation; The Fendi Collection; Vila Casas Foundation; Goya Museum; Zuloaga Collection; Omega Capital Group Collection; The Paul van Rensch Foundation; Vila Viniteca Collection; Van de Ende Foundation among others.
She works with Opera Gallery in Madrid, New York, London, Paris, Miami, Dubai, Hong Kong, and Singapore; and has collaborated with various galleries throughout her long career such as Smith Davidson Gallery in Amsterdam or MPV Gallery in Oisterwijk, the Netherlands; Art of The World Gallery in Houston or Bill Lowe Gallery in Atlanta, USA; or Die Galerie in Frankfurt am Main in Germany. She has participated in international fairs such as BRAFA in Brussels, Zona Maco in Mexico, PAM Amsterdam, Art Miami, Art Basel Miami, Contemporary Istanbul, Art Central Hong Kong, and Artfair Cologne.
Cabellut has also received different distinctions such as Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Barcelona (2024), the Encomienda de la Real Orden de Isabel la Católica (2024), Influential Award in the Culture category from El Confidencial (2024), La Vanguardia Culture Category Award (2023), Telva Culture Award (2023), Legacy Deposit in the Caja de las Letras of the Cervantes Institute (2022), "National Artist of the Year" in the Netherlands (2021), Influential Artist Award from F&A La Vanguardia (2019), Excellence Award in the field of Culture from the Community of Madrid (2019), Honor Award from the Fair Saturday Foundation (2019) or the Person of the Year Award from the Fuera de Serie edition of the newspaper El Mundo (2018).
Recent projects Cabellut has developed in parallel to her exhibitions: Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich National Opera, where he signed the scenography, video, and costumes for the work Karl V by Ernst Krenek (2019); with the contemporary choreographer Rocío Molina, Golden Lion of the Venice Festival, the performance Imagen for the Bienal XXI de Flamenco de Sevilla (2019); for the Opera Le Siège de Corinthe (2018) she made stage, costumes & video for the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro in Italy or the film collaboration in "Story of Hannah Chaplin". (2022/2024) British/Dutch and Spanish co-production, directed by Carmen Chaplin, using advanced animation techniques she created the scenes of Hannah Chaplin's life of which there are no documentary references.
Highlighting recent editions that cover different ranges such as the recently published "Goya x Lita Cabellut. Los Disparates" on the occasion of the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid; the monograph "Unfolding Density" by the historian Tayfun Belgin published by the German publisher TeNeues; the artist's book on "Bodas de sangre" published by Artika Editorial and collaborations with the publishing house La Cama Sol such as "(A)Mar" or "Antes de que venga la noche" and also with the Editorial La Huerta Grande "El sabor a sangre no se me quita de la voz."
TRAJECTORY (Exhibitions only)
Exploration/Origins 1982-2004
After her education at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, she considers her first relevant exhibition "The Caravans" (1994/ The Hague) where she began with an organic abstraction with figurative references.
In her series "Sepulcro" (1997-2002) the call for a figurative schematism, of an expressionist character, where a religious spirit is intuitively present, is already evident.
In "The Forms of the Spirit" (2002-2003 / Barcelona-The Hague-Den Bosch. Catalogue) she begins to acquire an identifiable style, incorruptible sobriety in chromatic terms, colours subjected to the lightness of transparency and the driving of a ‘negrismo’ of two of her inescapable masters: Goya and Rembrandt.
Abstract Figuration: Creative Development 2005-2010
In "The Generals" (2006 Catalogue) she elaborates a study of characters and penetrates the density of the political/military face, portraits that occupy the entire pictorial space, allegorical representations, whose psychological profiles betray the high degree of impermeability of the human being when it hides its state as an inclement beast.
In "Mind Solitude" (2007/2008 Catalogue) Cabellut also works on transvestites, clowns, and prostitutes and makes a series on mental illnesses which are managed through Opera Gallery.
In "A la Mesa" (2008/ Opera Gallery Seoul) she was inspired by the film "La grande bouffe" by Marco Ferreri (1973), where four friends, united by hedonism and deep boredom, take refuge in a mansion with an extreme purpose: to indulge in an endless banquet that leads them to suicide. Gluttony and lust as an excuse for dialectical debate on human excesses.
"The Patriots" and "Broken Glass Heroes" (2008/ Opera Gallery Dubai) exemplify positions of resistance, where human beings dream of a happy world and fix their gaze on hope, broken lives captured with the same sobriety of their colours and gestural brushstrokes, in which the spirit of Rembrandt or Goya is once again present.
In "Country Life" (2008/2009/ Freinsheim, Germany. Catalogue) the protagonists move away from urban dramaturgy because they are inhabitants of rural or peasant life and their faces are the testimony of the Horatian balance that refers to carpe diem.
In "State of Grace" (2009/2010) the artist delves into different models of emotionality through half-constructed figures that we sense as representations of helplessness, shared loneliness, and expressive images of tenderness, happiness or unhappiness.
The Human Condition: Heroes and Realities 2010-2018
In "Madness & Reason" (2010/ Bill Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, USA) Cabellut moves closer to what we know as clinical psychology, in a particular pictorial diagnosis of mental or neurobiological health: a tribute to the figures of Don Quixote – who to the artist represent values of the human being –, Sancho Panza, Dulcinea and, by extension, Miguel de Cervantes.
"Camarón" (2011/ Galerie Kai Dikhas, Berlin. Catalogue) Camarón sitting, concentrating on the heartbreak of his singing, clapping his hands or simply smoking, the intimate figure that Lita claims as a peculiar religion and creative force.
In "Frida, The Black Pearl" (2011/ Opera Gallery London. Catalogue) she intends to reveal Frida Kahlo's soul as a force of resistance and transformation involved in life; performative photo ballets emerge such as "Shit Happens" (2011), which gives life to a reborn Frida: a simple scenography of the fractured spine and "Slobbering Worms Dreaming of Being Butterflies" as a companion text.
"Coco: The Testimony of Black and White" (2011/ Opera Gallery Paris. Catalogue) only reinforces the parameters of an increasingly consolidated realism, accentuating the construction of detail that she had begun in Frida, bringing us closer to her scrutinizing study of a psychology of the character that she portrays in different positions.
"After the Show" (2011/2013 Galerie Terminus, Munich. Catalogue) "Behind the Curtains" (2013 Opera Gallery Hong Kong. Digital catalogue) are authentic representations of the great circus of life, the poetic charge is enormous and acquires a special prominence, not only because of the nature and mood of the iconographies, where the crackle effect that her portraits will present from now on is generalized but also because of the value that the author grants, more and more, to the word as a poem.
"Memories Wrapped in Gold Paper" (2012/ Opera Gallery Dubai. Catalogue) Memories of female beauty, young women hidden in the preciousness of exotic multicoloured clothes related to those of the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century. A metonymy "... of tradition and the values that we must preserve...". The Baroque joy is accentuated by the total construction of the figure, it goes beyond the face and concentrates on the warm fabrics, bringing us closer to the most naked concept of Kantian beauty and its fragile gaze: a refraction of disinterested pleasure and homage to a taste that can move away from knowledge and can be purely aesthetic and, of course, subjective.
"Portrait of Human Knowledge" (2012/ Opera Gallery London. A unique portrait of human knowledge, a vivid account of some of the great creators of the twentieth century, the power of creation in all fields, something like a tribute to art and its geniuses, who testify to their passion and dedication beyond their commitments. It is also a history of our great references, a summary of the encyclopaedias of life that any human being should know to understand the meaning of the last century.
"Trilogy of Doubt" (2012/ Het Noordbrabants Museum, Den Bosch. 2013/Fundació Vila Casas Barcelona. Catalogue). It is a compendium of paintings that can be extended to the field of philosophy, understood as the attitude of our mind towards the problems of our existence. She raises hypotheses when analysing the pictorial-philosophical corpus, because beyond the primacy of its formal structure, it positions man at the core of doubt, to discover as victims among the beast of controlling power that we have allowed to exist, the system of ignorance or the dissolution of all systems.
"Dried Tear" (2013/ Opera Gallery Singapore. An aesthetic tribute to Orientalism, Asia and the great painters who were influenced by them in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Van Gogh and Gustav Klimt. Materialized in substantial figures of geisha against an intensely lyrical ‘informalist ‘background.
"Hidden Dreams" (2013/ Opera Gallery Seoul. Catalogue) The female figures reappear, revealing a greater degree of vital optimism that contributes to the rupture of the neutral backgrounds, now gestured with warm touches of evanescent colour and an atmosphere of glazes that associate crackle as a deconstructive poetics of the entire painting. A dream of a world of illusion and hope in the face of previous visions that placed doubt at the epicentre of a more pessimistic analysis of real life. In formal terms, it is a tribute to the most classical pictorial values, to light and colour.
"The Black Tulip" (2014/ Opera Gallery Paris. CSMVS The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Bombay) One of her most ambitious iconographic and formal programmes. It is a tribute she pays to her host country and one of its most fertile historical periods, the Dutch Golden Age. The belief in the 'black tulip' is still a symbol of the will and the entrepreneurial spirit, in addition to building an exercise of denunciation in the human mind and soul, it is the construction of an iconography that manages to merge the real and the fabled amid great chromatic sobriety.
"Disturbance" (2015/ Museum Jan. Amstelveen) She introduces a notion of performance and disturbance, where she once again raises the representation of fleeting time and the problem of the individual's loneliness, making use of still life immersed in the chaos of painting, and through male and female nudes of different ages, little people and very plastic, withered bodies that accentuate their pose in front of the artist.
"Impulse" (2015/ Opera Gallery London. Catalogue) It is almost an autobiographical portrait of her positions on art and especially the definition of what she understands as creation: a tremendously violent impulse, associated with passion and love that, in this series, she exemplifies with young female figures, with clear foreheads, following the traces of classical Flemish painting, riddled with brushstrokes of paint and with installations of flowers. She breaks the stable image of beauty and in this way forces us to look at "beauty" from a different perspective, showing how vulnerable the perception of reality is.
"Blind Mirror" (2015/ Hälsinglands Museum, Sweden. ) These large-format portraits, which she associates with a title linked to their origin, their profession or their beliefs (agnostic, Catholic, artist, Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Shaman, Hindu, capitalist, Buddhist...) are a testimonial cry in the face of barbarism and lack of understanding. The ironic wink of their formalism denounces, however, a call for tolerance and coexistence in a world, ours, that is still experiencing fundamentalist wars, that generates refugees and the displacement of masses of people fleeing violence, that, with difficulty, accepts a population frightened by being different.
"Fairy Flowers" (2016/ Opera Gallery Beirut) It recovers, perhaps, the sweeter side of life, as in the series "Coral Flower" of 2015, at least in appearance, and the portraits link with the previous series, however, they break reality as an absolute representation of a continuum, as the beautiful young women portrayed appear dissociated in their formal structure: in contrast to the realism of the faces, the clothes and the backgrounds are the field of experience of gestural abstraction, the space of dripping freed from colour and veiled transparencies;
"Color of Dew" (2016/Opera Gallery Dubai) The female figures incorporate the multi-coloured and evanescent bouquets of flowers into their laps as if they were a still life. The gestural rictus of the liberated brushstrokes extends that flowery field and the warm lust of its colour to the backgrounds and oppose the fragility of the Tempus fugit, as in the ancient vanitas, to a beauty bathed in the melancholic verismo of its facial features, a beauty that aspires to be an allegory of the eternal. It is the gaze of a metonymy that extends the fragment of its formal structure to the whole and acquires an identity value.
"Testimony" (2017/2018 MAC Contemporary Art Museum, La Coruña. Catalogue) Generic title of the exhibition at the MAC that in six chapters reflects the concerns described and reiterated in the work of Cabellut. There is a special link between art and real life, although positioned in the importance of the story from the construction of language she goes in search of beauty in all its variables, an objective that has become a centrality of her work. The exhibition is an in-depth history of the renewed linguistic impact that she makes by squeezing tradition and, in addition, a projective way of interpreting the world she has lived in.
"Army of Poets" (2017/ Opera Gallery Paris, Hong Kong. The paradox of war is that it often arises from an impulse of idealism and the need to protect values, but at the same time, the violence and cruelty of war silences the voice of ethics. In the eye of the cyclone, destruction rules silence, but from this silence poetry can emerge like a flower from scorched earth, and poetry can speak the language of ethics, so that hope can someday flourish again.
"Retrospective" (2017/2018 Fundació Vila Casas, Barcelona. Catalogue) "Poetry Never Gives Up" (2018/ Cascais Cultural Center. Catalogue)
Creative expansion: Transformation and Liberation 2018- now
"The Victory of Silence" (2019/Ibercaja Museo Goya, Zaragoza. Catalogue) The first exhibition in Spain in which the emphasis lies on her recent work and some new works about transformation and liberation into a victory of silence.
"Reencuentro" (2021-2022/Omega Capital, Madrid. Catalogue) This exhibition presents a series of works from the years 2018-2021, where next to portraits we also witness a qualitative leap in a commitment to abstraction in some works that either border on the non-figurative or directly launch into the abstract, and whose materiality is three-dimensional and sculptural. This expanded dimension, by folding the painted canvases into sculptures, is another of the questions raised in this exhibition.
"Woman of the Night" (2021-2023) The line of development is to break with the specialization in representations of sex workers by emphasizing their humanity, their crucial role in art history and their constant struggle for human rights today. It is to recognize their contribution to our cultural heritage, as muses of art, as well as to tear their cloaks of prejudice to reveal their humanity.
"Unfolding Density" (2022-2023/MPV Gallery, Oisterwijk)
"Fur and Feather" (2022/Opera Gallery London. Catalogue) This exhibition began 28 years ago by choosing the material that would give the muscle and skin what it wanted to represent. The material was made up of scars and cracks and, over time, it began to reach the surface of the skin, to what makes us so vulnerable, to what society makes us be. The interest is above all in the surface of the skin because that skin is exposed to the outside, to light, to darkness, to pain, to pleasure... From the skin, we perceive all those feelings that we transmit to our intellect and there they are translated, reformed, exaggerated or erased. This current material and visual surface bring you very close to the sensation and perception of feathers. Watch and admire the birds, which move fast, and agile, diving purposefully to the ground and vertically piercing the clouds. They have the ability, without shame or guilt, to say goodbye to their feathers every year to renew themselves, to adapt their plumage to their new circumstances and abilities.
"Tremble" (2023/Opera Gallery Dubai. Catalogue) This series gives space to the visual language of graffiti. Her previous performances were characterized by a broken surface, now by making openings in their surfaces, she exposes the graffiti on the lower canvas that appears to be shapes attached to the canvas. With this new layer, she plays with our perception and opens an intimate perspective: the realization that the scratches on her soul have led her to where she is now. They reflect the layers of your personal history while also revealing the universality of individual experience.
"The girl in the gaze" (2024 Opera Gallery, Madrid. Digital Catalogue) A deep attention to the mystery of the human figure continues, to that pleasure of appearance that reminds us of the touch of the flesh. She dialogues with Goya's theatricality, composes portraits that have an "exotic" tonality and above all seeks the energy hidden in the face, transmitting to the felt life accentuating the idea that time is the age of things. This pagan story of the Mayans is the best of the pretexts to work on innocence, goodness and 'the girl in the gaze' that we must preserve; all to survive the work she was doing simultaneously with Goya's more obscure “Disparates’.
"Goya x Lita Cabellut. Los Disparates. Miserable humanity, the fault is thine" (2024/2025, Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. Catalogue) A conversation that longed to delve into the mystery and secrecy of the Follies. A work that unites two artists who two centuries later review together the concepts and values of the human condition. Two creative processes with the same ambition; to review the values of a society in crisis. Canvases stained with ink or pigment to x-ray the impulses of individuals disoriented by changes of era and forced to interpret themselves in a scenario of ethical and moral crisis. Two views that analyse the "soul" of the human being. Dialogues that speak to us of fear, envy, friendship, love, violence, ideology, politics, chaos, old age, ambition, power, loyalty. And they do so by shedding light on these concepts. A metaphorical light that accompanies us to delve into the human condition, a narrative light that rebukes us for the sadness felt by a society blind to injustice, and an essential plastic light to understand its way of 'understanding' Art.