Menchu Lamas
Menchu Lamas (b. 1954, Vigo, Spain) is one of the defining painters of contemporary Spanish art. In 1980 she co-founded Grupo Atlántica together with Antón Patiño, Ánxel Huete, Guillerme Monroy and Román Pereiro, a group of Galician artists set on reactivating Galician art and placing it on the international scene. The group drew on native traditions such as prehistoric art, Romanesque motifs and rural legend, and fused them with a modern pictorial language.
Her paintings are instantly recognisable: broad brushstrokes, primary colours and a predominantly large-scale square format, with clear affinities to Pop art and the CoBrA movement. Over the years her work has moved from chromatic abstraction towards a symbolic figuration built on a small vocabulary of recurring signs, among them fish, roosters, snakes, hands, moons and circles. For Lamas, vibrant colour was a liberation that let her develop a language entirely her own, resulting in paintings that are at once intimate and monumental.
She held her first solo exhibition in 1982 at Galería Buades in Madrid and has since exhibited in Spain, Germany, Italy, Morocco, the United States and Brazil, including the XVIII São Paulo Biennial and Five Spanish Artists in New York. She received the Galician Culture Award for Visual Arts in 2010, was named Distinguished Citizen of Vigo in 2016, was inducted into the Royal Galician Academy of Fine Arts in 2018 and received the Otero Pedrayo Prize in 2021.
Her work is held in the Museo Reina Sofía, MACBA Barcelona, CGAC Santiago de Compostela, IVAM Valencia and Fundación Juan March, as well as the La Caixa and Afundación collections, among others.
