Lita Cabellut

Education: Studied painting at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.

Lives and works in The Hague/Netherlands

Biography

Lita Cabellut is a Catalan Gitana. Orphaned at an early age, she spent some of her youth living homeless on the streets of her native city before being adopted by an aristocratic Catalan family at the age of 13.

As a teenager, the artist visited the Prado in Madrid, where she was particularly impressed by Goya, Velázquez, Murillo and Ribera. The formative influences of these artists, alongside the often harsh experiences of her childhood, can still be felt in her paintings today. At the age of 19, Cabellut left her home country to study painting at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.

In an interview, she gave as a particular reason for her choice that the light in the Netherlands is like no other country and is a magical revelation for the painter. It was in the Netherlands that she found her pictorial language: on large-format canvases and often in expressive gestures, she depicts people marked by life – her main concern is to show human greatness, their ‘grandeur’.

Cabellut’s subjects are close friends, artistic cousins and celebrities, as well as people on the street. Her art also incorporates her involvement with all other types of art: Fashion design, photography, music, literature. The paintings are characterised by a particular drama of light and colour. The rich textures of the backgrounds and the gestural painting have an immediate effect.

In the Camarón series of paintings presented at the Kai Dikhas Gallery in June 2011, for example, Lita Cabellut explored the famous Andalusian flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla (1950-1992). The style-defining musician is revered by countless followers of this art form for his singing, which transcends the boundaries of traditional flamenco. With releases such as Como el agua, La leyenda del tiempo and Soy Gitano, he established the music of the Spanish Roma in Spain’s majority society. He was and is a political and cultural figure of identification for the Spanish Gintanos and has achieved the popularity of a pop star. Lita Cabellut captures the passion of Camarón’s flamenco in her paintings, as well as the harsh living conditions of the heroin-addicted musician. Through expressive brushstrokes and the occasional dissolution of form, Cabellut expresses Camarón’s inner turmoil and pain, but also his energy – a state known in flamenco as duende.