Lavish, theatrical and bold are the first words that come to mind when you first encounter Lita Cabellut’s human-scale paintings. Her sultry characters captured our attention at Art Miami and we had to know more! The artist draws her images entirely from memory, explained Wilhelm Grusdat, founder of Galerie Terminus in Munich that represents the artist in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. No photographs – just memory.
Interview transcript
Wilhelm Grusdat: We are in front of our newest young artist, Lita Cabellut. Behind me you see a painting of Marlene Dietrich, the famous actress. Lita, sometimes works half a year on a painting, first she makes the canvas and the crackled glaze in the canvas and then she figures out how the face fits. It’s not painted from a photo, it’s only painted from her memory. And then she turns the canvas around to see how the crackling fits, if it doesn’t, she prepares another canvas to get a right positioning of the face and the crackles, and then you see the result behind – beautiful paintings. What is very important, in the painting behind me — the eyes are closed, but when we look at the other paintings of hers, the eyes – they are really speaking, unbelievable!
Lita was adopted as a small child by very wealthy people and they recognized that they can only stop this hyperactivity with painting and so this small lady grew into a very important painter. We did a show of her work two years ago in Paris, it was sold out in a first hour. There was only one buyer and it was published, normally I never talk about our clients, so it was the ruler of Brunei.
Interview ©galleryIntell. Artwork ©Lita Cabellut. Images courtesy of Galerie Terminus, Munich.