Laffón, Carmen | Colección

20th-21st Century. Spanish

Laffón’s first contact with the art world came at a very early age thanks to the painter Manuel González Santos (1875-1949), a family friend. She completed her training at the Santa Isabel de Hungría School of Fine Arts in Seville and at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid. Her definitive style was profoundly marked by her trips and stays in Paris, Rome and Vienna, among other cities. Her first exhibition was held in 1957 at Ateneo de Madrid, followed in 1963 by a show at Galería Biosca.

Carmen Laffón’s trajectory coincided with the emergence of several painting movements that questioned prior artistic values and favoured abstraction and non-objective painting. Always going against the grain, Laffón never relinquished figurative painting which she used to render landscapes, still lifes and portraits.

In 1967 she became deeply involved in teaching, when she founded the El Taller School with Teresa Duclós (1934) and José Soto (1934-2016). She continued her teaching career in Seville when she was named professor of drawing at the city’s School of Fine Arts, a post she held until 1981.

In 1982 Laffón was awarded the National Visual Arts Prize and in 1998 she was appointed a member of the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts. In 1992, the Museo Reina Sofía organised a retrospective exhibition of her work. At that time, the artist, primarily devoted to painting, was also beginning to experiment with sculpture.