Pepi Sánchez

Pepi Sánchez was a Sevillian painter. Born in 1929, she moved to Madrid in 1958 and lived there until she died in 2012.

She had a unique and imaginative style, with oneiric elements and a clear Baroque influence. Her work was always independent from fashions and trends, and it represents an original addition to Spanish plastic arts. Her particular use of unmodified rocks and stones, as a support for her paintings, was an important part of her legacy. The characters that usually inhabit the strange structures in her paintings adapt themselves to the grooves in the stones, resulting in a surprising combination of painting and sculpture.

Josefa Sánchez Díaz started at the age of 12 when she joined the Santa Isabel de Hungria School of Fine Arts, in Seville. There her talent impressed teachers, as proven by her high grades and the awards she received. Later, however, these same teachers were to feel disappointed when, after finishing her training, she left the mainstream Realism, which she mastered, to start a new path, breaking away from the established styles.

Challenged by the dominant traditionalism, "She began working at what was starting to be called 'Modern Art', and refused to submit to the interfering past", declared José María Moreno Galván at the presentation of her first individual exhibition in Madrid (1954). After this first exhibition, there have been more than fifty opportunities to admire her work.

Little by little, her singular style, easy to recognize even though her work was always evolving, took shape. With remarkable imagination, she filled her works with legendary and fantastic characters, amazing oneiric landscapes and, as if in a guide to the interpretation of dreams, the titles she presented to the public that were both enigmatic and enlightening, as an of invitation to try to decipher this personal and magical world.

In her iconographic repertoire we find angels, children, magical animals, princesses, legendary monsters, inhabitants of impossible landscapes and structures that transport us to our childhood memories and joyful dreams. But we also find fighting feminists, rejected princes, caryatids tired of being so, and dying stars, conveying messages that, without affecting the gentleness of her style, can still be critical and forceful.

Josefa Sánchez Díaz, was born in Seville on 4 April 1929, second daughter of Ana María Díaz and José Sánchez. She had an elder sister, Lola.

...
Wikipedia