Mercedes Gómez-Pablos

Mercedes Gómez-Pablos (born 1940 in Palma de Mallorca) is a Spanish painter who has lived most of her life between Madrid and Paris. Active since the late 1950s, she began studying at sixteen in Eduardo Peña's workshop in Madrid and later at the Taller Le Louvre in Paris, and held her first solo exhibition at nineteen. In 1959 she exhibited at the Club de los Poetas in Formentor, founded by Camilo José Cela, beginning a friendship that lasted fifty years. In the 1960s, in Chile, she discovered the poetry of Miguel Arteche and met Pablo Neruda, and at the end of that decade her encounter with José Bergamín in Paris turned her painting towards abstraction. Her work moves fluidly between abstraction and figuration, with vibrant colour, gestural energy and Mediterranean light, and is known for its hidden interiors, closed windows and libraries that evoke veiled stories and a poetry that inhabits the unseen. Her paintings have been shown in museums and cultural institutions in Spain, France, Mexico, Chile, Argentina and the United States, including the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, FIAC, ARCO, the Museo Luis González Robles in Alcalá de Henares and the Museo del Grabado Español Contemporáneo in Marbella. Her honours include the Silver Medal of the City of Paris (1961, 1992), the Plaque of Illustrious Painter from the Association of Spanish Writers and Artists (2006) and appointment as European Academician of Sciences, Arts and Letters in Paris (2014). She is a corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Luis in Zaragoza, and her work is held in public and private collections in Europe and Latin America.