Lita Cabellut

LITA CABELLUT (Sariñena, Huesca, 1961).
Untitled, 2024.
Mixed media on canvas.
Signed and dated on the back.
Measurements: 90 x 60 cm.

Dated 2024—a particularly significant year in Lita Cabellut’s career—this work belongs to her period of full artistic maturity, when the artist expanded the possibilities of portraiture through fragmentation techniques and an increasingly physical conception of the pictorial surface. That same year, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Barcelona and the Commendation of the Royal Order of Isabella the Catholic, and she developed the project “Goya x Lita Cabellut. Los Disparates,” presented at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando between 2024 and 2025.

The female figure, one of Cabellut’s major iconographic themes, appears here subjected to a marked vertical fragmentation that disrupts the continuity of the face and body without making them disappear. The narrow bands running through the composition introduce an almost architectural rhythm and compel the viewer to visually reconstruct the image, transforming the portrait into a tension between presence and fragmentation. The contrast between blacks, whites, and intense pinks reinforces this duality, while the model’s expression and frontal pose preserve the powerful psychological dimension characteristic of his painting.

The treatment of texture is particularly significant. In this work, the crackle, transparencies, splatters, and accumulations of paint do not function as incidental effects, but rather intervene directly in the representation: the skin, clothing, and background seem to share the same painterly material subjected to wear, layering, and rupture.

The piece also relates to the phase that the artist’s own career has defined, since 2018, as one of transformation and liberation, characterized by a progressive expansion of the portrait toward more abstract, material, and three-dimensional solutions. The combination of a high-impact figurative image with this fragmented structure places the work squarely within a line of thought that is particularly representative of her recent explorations.

Lita Cabellut has developed a personal artistic language based on fresco-related techniques, combined with contemporary painting methods and a deliberately eroded, cracked, and layered surface. She trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and lives and works in the Netherlands. Her practice has expanded beyond painting to encompass sculpture, photography, installation, and set design. She has exhibited at institutions such as the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, the Fundació Vila Casas, the Goya Museum, and the Museum Jan, and her work is included in various institutional and international collections. In 2021, she was named Artist of the Year in the Netherlands.