Margarita Checa and Lita Cabellut Exhibit Work at The Lowe Gallery
-Alberto Brown Rodriguez
The prestigious Lowe Gallery will hold a reception next Friday, April 8th, to open the joint exhibition of Peruvian sculptor Margarita Checa and Spanish painter Lita Cabellut. The Santa Monica gallery will open a similar exhibition of the artists the same day.
At 34 years of age, Cabellut is considered by many critics of European art to be the most important painter to have emerged from Spain in the last fifty years. Since her debut at The Lowe Gallery in 2002, Cabellut has become the most-sold figurative expressionist. At the moment, The Lowe Gallery is the only gallery exhibiting her work in the United States. The famous painter was born October 24, 1961 in Sariñena, near Zaragoza. She was found and fell in love with painting at age thirteen on a visit to the Prado in Madrid. She later studied fine art at Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, Holland; and states that her technique has been developed over the thirty years of investigations of material and language, pigments and oils.
Cabellut says that the show presented by The Lowe Gallery is a portrait of a facet of the human condition, and that it should move the spectator to recognize himself in it. “The emotions the portraits represent are dialogues, questions, answers, the interchange between rationality and sentiment –the rejection, and confirmation, that in each human being exists all these portraits I have painted,” explained the painter.
For her part, Checa has gained a position of renown at the international level for her extraordinary ability to transform wood, stone and metal into sensual, melancholy and provocative life-size sculptures. The Peruvian artist was born October 17, 1950 in Lima, Peru. She studied at the Catholic University of Lima, under the supervision of one of the greatest sculptors of her country, Ana Maccagno. Later, Checa enriched her technique under the no less talented artist, Christina Gálvez.
“One person who changed my life, and from whom I learned drawing, was Christina Gálvez. She directed a workshop of intuitive drawing. I studied with her from 1975 until 1982, the year she died,” recalls the sculptor with gratitude.
Checa says The Lowe Gallery show forms part of the “Doors of Perception,” a group of sculpture which bears that name, but which she also applies generally to some of her other pieces.
“There will be pumas and boats as well. The cat is an animal that disturbed me in both dreams and real life for a long time, until I managed to decipher it. Only at that moment could I possess the symbol,” says Checa. “”The same thing happened to me with the boats. I began with Anamnesis, dreaming that I was fishing on an unquiet sea, and I continue to dream of water. I think in a moment of giving life, there is a return to water,” she added.
Like the work of Cabellut, Checa’s work has been very well accepted by the collectors who frequent The Lowe Gallery. The relationship between the Peruvian sculptor and The Lowe Gallery began in 1996. “It was Bill who, on seeing a few of my works in ’96, drastically changed the course of my life. I was on my way to my father’s estate to work in the south. And I had this man, who I didn’t know, on the other end of the line and he told me to produce the most pieces I possibly could. So I worked fourteen hours daily, without stopping, over seven months,” said Checa.
Now in her free time, Checa plays golf, reads, and rides horses. She also enjoys getting to know people, one of the greatest satisfactions life has given her. “It satisfies me enormously to meet people who have been near my work and have been touched by it. I have made incredible friends through it.”
The Peruvian sculptor affirmed that she would be at the opening of the exhibition with some of those great friends April 8th, at 6 p.m., at The Lowe Gallery, located at 75 Bennett Street, suite A-2, in Atlanta.
For more information, call 404.352.8144 or visit the website: www.lowegallery.com.
