Life Tearing Art Apart

Fundación Bancaja | Valencia

March 28, 2025 - August 31, 2025

Fundación Bancaja presents Life Tearing Art Apart, the first survey exhibition to overview Lita Cabellut’s production from the optic of the vital and creative drives that have always underpinned her work, exploring human emotions, desires and fears.

Curated by Eloy Martínez de la Pera, the new show, the first by the artist in Valencia, brings together 120 works created over the last twenty years. On loan from various private and public collections, they reflect the multidisciplinary scope of her artistic expression through paintings, sculptures, installations and videos.

The exhibition as a whole includes several works never seen before in public, like Herinneringen (2003), Edvard Munch – Gratende akt (2021) or the suite inspired by Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding, while at once showcasing the artist’s recent revisiting of some of her earlier works, in which she has now intervened.

The evolution of Lita Cabellut’s practice stands as a testament to her abiding quest to dig deeper into the more intimate layers of the human psyche. With her work, she seeks to stimulate an aesthetic reaction, but also to make us rethink who we are and how we interact with our surrounding world. The artist’s personal vision foregrounded in this exhibition is sustained on five major concepts that have fuelled her work, constantly interacting in an ongoing dialogue: Life, Passion, Power, Identity and Freedom.

Cabellut’s technique is indebted to different influences, ranging from the tradition of Spanish Golden Age painting to abstract expressionism, and defined by a bold use of colour and texture. Employing an updated version of the fresco technique, her works possess a tactile quality that invites contemplation. The artist plays with light and shadow, creating volumes that emerge from the canvas, capturing not only the outer physical appearance of her subjects but also their inner self.

Her creative process is both rigorous discipline as well as an intuitive dance with material in a fine balance between technical control and emotional commitment. Throughout her career she has addressed various issues that range from a reflection on the female condition and homages to historical and cultural figures to her personal focus on the socially marginalized.

To tie in with the exhibition a catalogue has been published with reproductions of the works on view and essays written by the curator Eloy Martínez de la Pera, the writer X. Antón Castro and the art historian Tayfun Belgin. As part of its cultural and arts mediation programme, Fundación Bancaja also offers guided visits led by an expert specialized in art and cultural mediation.

The exhibition Lita Cabellut. Life Tearing Art Apart is on view at Fundación Bancaja in Valencia from 28 March until 31 August 2025.

LIFE. Death. Existence. Heartbreak. Identity

In Lita Cabellut’s work, the duality between death and life is a recurring theme that plumbs the depths of human existence. Through her art she examines the fragility and inevitability of death as well as the vitality and beauty of life, striking up a visual dialogue that invites the beholder to reflect on the ephemeral and precious nature of existence.

Death is depicted in an evocative and often symbolic way in her vanitas or Skulls, a constant throughout her career which she leverages to express life’s futility, meaninglessness and fragility, or more explicitly in figures and images of desolation and decay that transmit the brevity of life in veiled portraits like Arjan and Dieu Donner from the Crossing Times series, made over the course of more than two decades.

In her work, death and life are not opposing concepts but the two sides of the one reality. Her art invites us to acknowledge the fleetingness of life in works like Kumba and La historia de una flor.

PASSION. Emotion. Tragedy. Pain. Freedom.

Exploring emotional depth and human passion has been one of the constants of Lita Cabellut’s visual language, helping her to create portraits charged with an emotional intensity that is both raw and poetic.

The artist depicts people lacerated by gestures and vivid expressions. Her palette of colours is instrumental in conveying a sense of passion in her works. The rich, vibrant tones combined with deep shadows and dramatic contrasts create an atmosphere seething with emotive energy. The artist’s visual expression, grounded in palpable textures, invites the beholder to delve deeper into the poignant world she has created.

Cabellut’s work reflects the depths of love and the complexity of its emotional manifestations, as we can see in the faces of Henty, Essau and Chaplin, or in works from her series After the show and Blood Wedding. Fierce passions, both requited and unrequited, that defy social conventions are what force her characters to confront their deepest desires and the devastating consequences of their choices, as captured in the pupils portrayed in La huella del acero.

POWER. Authority. Submission. Ethics. Passion.

Lita Cabellut has never stopped questioning the notion of power. Her highly expressive and emotionally charged monumental paintings afford a unique and provocative vision of power.

Her portraits of powerful characters capture not only the authority and influence they wield, but also the fragility and humanity concealed beneath the surface of the public image. The combination of oil painting, collage and texture creates visual layers that reflect the complexity of power relations, evoking the interconnection of forces and the intricate network of influences that define that world.

Her creative drive has led Cabellut to explore the issue of power in a particularly striking way through works focused on historical figures like popes and emperors.

The artist has also addressed the issue of power through her artistic interpretation of Blood Wedding, in which she explores the power dynamics at play in human relationships, especially in the context of a conventional and conservative society like the one Lorca portrayed in his play.

In response to the oppression of power, Lita Cabellut often lends greater visibility to people overlooked by society. We can see as much in works like Dhafer, Maribela and Valerio, whose faces speak of suffering, resistance, hope and dignity.

IDENTITY. Reflections. Shadow. Tension. Power.

The concept of ‘reflection’, in both its literal and the figurative senses, is core to Cabellut’s work. One can appreciate the simple visual reflections with which she creates depth and texture in her paintings through layers of paint and varnish, and with which she achieves reflective effects that bring her portraits to life, suggesting emotions and moods behind the eyes of the subjects.

Her works also contain profound emotional reflections that explore the complexity of human experience, showing not only the physical appearance of her subjects but also their inner emotional states. Works like Ocelot and Winston symbolize the way in which people see themselves or how they are perceived by others.

Social and cultural reflections appear in her works to address issues that act as metaphors of contemporary society, with which to represent the interaction between individuals and communities, the tensions and contradictions in the modern world or the empathy—or lack of it—between different cultures that makes society better. Reflections to be found in faces like those of Alexus, Willem and Ray.

FREEDOM. Transcendence. Delirium. Dignity. Life.

Freedom is a complex notion captured in the characters painted by Lita Cabellut. Faces that appear to be liberated by self-acceptance, overcoming adversity or reaching a state of inner peace, and also liberated from social restrictions and imbued with a defiant spirit as exemplified by Sieb Posthuma or Saru.

In this section, we can see works like Johanna van Delf, Dulzura or the characters from Memories of the Lake or Trilogy of the Doubt whose attitude, facial expression and bodily posture externalize their own inner peace. With her poise and euphoria, Hannah Chaplin reminds us of the individual’s ability to define themself unfettered by the limitations imposed by their surrounding world. Meanwhile, Lola reflects that special connection with nature or the experience of personal transcendence.

Lita Cabellut’s own experience as an artist advocates art as a tool to explore and express ideas on freedom. Her multifaceted representations invite beholders to reflect on the meaning of freedom in their own lives and in the world around them.