Exhibitions

Carmen Laffón, the silent poetry of the everyday

Carmen Laffón, Armario negro, 1985, Colección privada, © Carmen Laffón, VEGAP, Madrid, 2026.

bonart madrid - 22/06/26

The Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum opens its doors to the intimate world of Carmen Laffón (Seville, 1934–2021) with Carmen Laffón: Variations , a major exhibition that revisits the career of one of the most singular creators in contemporary Spanish art. This is the first major monographic exhibition dedicated to the artist since her death in 2021 and brings together 77 works, including oil paintings, charcoal drawings, and sculptures created between 1956 and 2021.

The second woman to be admitted as a full member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, Laffón spent over sixty years developing her own unique artistic language, independent of trends and difficult to categorize. Her work originated from a realistic perspective on the objects and landscapes of her surroundings, but over time it evolved into an increasingly essential style of painting, where matter, light, and atmosphere took center stage, at times bordering on abstraction.

Carmen Laffón, Improvised Shelf, 2002-2003, Private Collection, © Carmen Laffón, VEGAP, Madrid, 2026.

The exhibition is structured in nine sections that explore the recurring motifs in her imagery: the Marcelina doll, cradles, baskets, wardrobes, the Doñana National Park, vineyards, lime, and salt flats. These are themes that the artist revisited time and again, in an exercise of variations reminiscent of musical composition, a discipline she became familiar with from childhood thanks to her piano studies.

Laffón's interiors are filled with everyday objects laden with memory—baskets, furniture, or sewing machines—while his landscapes are born from the places that shaped his life, especially Seville and Sanlúcar de Barrameda. In both cases, the seemingly simple is transformed into a contemplative experience where time seems to stand still.

The exhibition highlights Laffón's ability to transform the familiar into the universal. From the intimacy of her personal world to the large formats of her latest series on salt flats, vineyards, and the landscape of El Coto, the artist developed a profoundly poetic body of work in which each image is a new way of looking at the same mystery.