Menchu Lamas

For more than twenty years, since her explosive irruption into the artistic scene, Menchu Lamas has been a seminal figure in contemporary Spanish painting. Her bold, iconic paintings, characterised by broad brushstrokes, primary colours and a predominantly large-scale square format are instantly recognisable for their affinities to the Pop and CoBrA movements and for a reductive iconography based on simple forms - torsos, hands and circles that extend the full measure of the artist's arm.

During the early 1980s Menchu Lamas was a member of the Atlantica group, a loose confederacy of Galician artists intent on breaking with the "mannerist modernism and stylized regionalism" so prevalent at the time.  To Menchu Lamas, like the others in the group, the use of vibrant colour was a liberation, freeing her to develop a language entirely her own, resulting in a series of paintings, developed over the course of the past twenty five years, that are at once both intimate and monumental.

Menchu Lamas has enjoyed a distinguished exhibition trajectory and her work can be found amongst the most important public and institutional collections in the country, including the Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo, Madrid, Fundació La Caixa, Barcelona, MACBA, Barcelona, the Thomas Foundation, Munich and the Fundación Juan March.