Lita Cabellut

LITA CABELLUT (Sariñena, Huesca, 1961).
"Before the night comes".2018.
Artist's book, copy 3/50.
With 10 lithographs.
Signed and justified by the artist.
Measurements:
We are looking at an artist's book made by four hands between the renowned Spanish artist and the poet Javier Santiso (Saint Germain in Laye, France, 1969). The lithographs included in the collection were inspired by the poems of Santiso, a prestigious economics professor whose life and work led Cabellut to discover his new vocation. The unclassifiable book was built up gradually with progressive encounters between the painter and the poet. The strength of the verses converge with the subjugating figuration of Cabellut's "Rostros y Rastros". Visual poem and lyrical word engage in a fluid dialogue that proposes a fresh way of looking at life, giving fuel to the imagination. The "faces", through which Cabellut converses with great portraitists of the past, are combined with "traces", alluding to the roller as a metaphor for the technique that is a hallmark of the artist, who delves with rollers into the textures and scars of the skin.
Of gypsy origin, Lita Cabellut was born in the small town of Sariñena, in Huesca, into a family with serious dysfunctionalities. Abandoned by her parents, she was raised by her grandmother in the city of Barcelona. Las Ramblas, the Boquería market, the Port Vell and the Plaza Real, places full at the time of outsiders, artists and show business personalities but also tourists, were the setting for her childhood, marked by dyslexia and the need, at times, to beg. The death of her grandmother when she was only ten years old led to her placement in an orphanage, where, at the age of thirteen, she was adopted by an upper-class Catalan family. The paintings of Goya, Velázquez, Ribera and Rembrandt, discovered during visits to the Prado Museum, revealed her artistic vocation and, in 1978, the artist held her first exhibition, at the Masnou Town Hall. In 1982 she moved to Holland with her family, where she studied with a scholarship at the Gerrit Rietveld art academy until 1984. The painting of the great Dutch baroque masters was essential in the construction of her art, not so much in terms of style as in terms of technique. The artist works with oil on canvas as well as drawing on paper, sculpture, photography, visual poems and video art. Sometimes her works take on certain aspects of the Italian "buon fresco", or she adds a crackle effect to her oil paintings that produces a strong plastic, visual impact. Her work abounds in portraits, where the strong influence of Rembrandt, Francis Bacon or Jackson Pollock can be seen, all of them characterised by the expressiveness of the line and the disfigurement of reality in an attempt to reflect the inner tearing of her models. The artist has participated in numerous exhibitions, both solo and group. She has received numerous awards, such as the Gypsy Culture Award for Painting and Visual Arts from the Institute of Gypsy Culture in 2011. She is also one of the most sought-after living artists on the current art market. In 2015, Artprice magazine ranked her 333rd on its list of the 500 most sought-after contemporary artists, behind only Miquel Barceló and Juan Muñoz.