"Menchu Lamas II Metamorphosis" at Miguel Marcos Gallery

The Miguel Marcos Gallery inaugurates on March 19 Menchu ​​Lamas II Metamorphosis. Pinturas de los 80, an exhibition that can be visited until May 15, 2022.

Menchu ​​Lamas (Vigo, 1954) is a central figure in understanding contemporary Spanish painting. A self-taught artist, she became known in the eighties and was part of Atlàntica, a group promoted by her, Antón Patiño, Antón Lamazares and Francisco Leiro, who reactivated and placed Galician art on the international scene.

His works are characterized by large formats, an interest that is given by the search for the feeling of being inside the painting, considering both a relationship of scale and a bodily involvement. In his work, elementary figures such as domestic animals and others that seem to come from some medieval bestiary, very hybrid and almost fabled, and at the same time within the Galician tradition, the sea and all its connotations and traditions, often emerge. All this is reflected, as mentioned above, in a format that is no longer large but directly "American" of the canvases. The gestures expressed in his works, the intensity - almost one could say violence - of his chromaticism, through wide brushstrokes and primary colors, already provide us with information about what his classics were.

In a neo-expressionist effervescence that in Galicia constituted the fundamental axis of the Atlantic group, a return of what has been repressed in a specific anthropological territory is contemplated. Menchu ​​Lamas metamorphosed into fantastic forms, not without a certain sense, defined, moreover, with a sure line, almost sculptural, so the relationship between background and figure "symbioticized", these masked beings arise, with bodies that look like columns, distinguishing -from the outer space by a black outline, applied as if it were a border.