Menchu Lamas
Menchu Lamas (Vigo, Spain, 1954) plays a central role in contemporary Spanish painting. In the 1980s she co-founded Atlántica, the Galician art group that sought to break with mannerist modernism and to position Galician art on the international art scene.
Her painting moves between intimacy and monumentality, elevating everyday objects into a vibrant symbolic universe where abstract and figurative elements fuse in large formats, structured by the distinctive color chromatics that define her expressive language. To achieve this, Lamas works with broad strokes of primary colors on large-scale canvases, drawing directly on the influence of Pop Art and an iconography built from simple forms.
Her work has been selected for major international exhibitions, including the São Paulo Biennial, Europalia, "Five Spanish Artists" in New York, "Spanish Kaleidoscope," and "Spanks Agent, Art," which traveled to several Scandinavian museums, as well as "Currents" at the ICA Boston. The CGAC devoted a retrospective to her work that traveled, exceptionally, to Milan, Naples, and Rome.
Her work is held in museums and public collections including the Los Bragales Collection (Santander, Spain), the Colección de Arte Contemporáneo "la Caixa" (Barcelona, Spain), the CGAC; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Santiago de Compostela, Spain), the MACBA; Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain), and the MNCARS; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain). In 2010 she received the Galician Culture Award in Plastic Arts, and in 2018 she was elected to the Royal Galician Academy of Fine Arts.
