Lita Cabellut

LITA CABELLUT (Sariñena, Huesca, 1961).
“Virgin Mary,” 2021.
Oil and mixed media on canvas.
Signed and dated on the back.
Measurements: 90 x 60 cm.

Created in 2021, the same year Lita Cabellut was named Artist of the Year in the Netherlands, this work belongs to a period of full artistic maturity in which the artist explores the tension between figuration and materiality. The portrait, the cornerstone of her body of work, becomes here a vehicle for an image of a spiritual nature: the Virgin, depicted in profile with her gaze raised, emerges with great clarity from a dark and almost abstract space.

Cabellut contrasts the precise and luminous modeling of the face with a surface of great plastic richness, marked by glazes, smudges, splatters, cracks, and areas with an eroded appearance. This coexistence of figurative definition and painterly materiality is one of the most recognizable aspects of her artistic language. The artist has developed a personal technique in which she combines methods associated with fresco painting with contemporary painting techniques, giving the surface an aged and layered appearance that visually incorporates the idea of time.

In *Virgin Mary*, this treatment takes on a special iconographic coherence. The concentration of light on the face and its isolation against the darkness evoke the tradition of religious portraiture, but Cabellut dispenses with a narrative or conventional Marian attributes to focus the image’s full intensity on the expression, the gaze, and the contrast between physical presence and indeterminate space. The reddish, earthy, and purplish tones that emerge in the background break through the darkness and establish a dialogue with the eroded areas of the flesh tones, integrating the figure into the very fabric of the canvas.

The work is also representative of a line of artistic exploration that was already fully established by this time. In 2019, the Goya Museum in Zaragoza presented *La victoria del silencio* (*The Victory of Silence*), an exhibition dedicated to her recent work and new artistic techniques, including crackle glazing. This focus on silence, introspection, and the human condition finds a particularly apt counterpart in the contemplative dimension of this Virgin Mary.

Lita Cabellut trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and has been developing her career in the Netherlands for decades. The human figure—and, in particular, the portrait—has occupied a central position in her body of work, which has since expanded to include sculpture, photography, installation, and other artistic media. Her recognition in the Netherlands culminated in 2021 with her selection as Artist of the Year. Her work has been featured in institutional exhibitions such as “The Victory of Silence” at the Goya Museum in Zaragoza and “Los Disparates” at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid—an exhibition that once again brought to the forefront her exploration of the human condition and her dialogue with the Spanish pictorial tradition.