Pepa was born in Granada in the 50s and studied at the city’s Art school before going to the Santa Isabel de Hungria Fine Arts School in Sevilla during the following decade.[1] It should come as no surprise that her first steps were dependent on a conservative academic training in the 60s based on figurative painting. As her friend María Lara (born in Loja Granada 1940) said «we had very good teachers like Pérez de Aguilera or Manuel Gutierrez».[2] Our artist had, therefore to overcome these discourses which,  in her earlier years, had led her through the genre of landscape in search of her personal journey. This refining of forms that we can observe happening quickly and radically led her to the early 70s and abstraction.

Her shift and its chronology is common to many Spanish artists of her generation. The difference between these discourses and those of neighbouring countries was a consequence of life under a national catholic dictatorship that kept the country firmly closed down. The advanced art studies taught in Seville in the second half of the 60s were as persistent as the drought in their gaze back at the academic formalism of the 19th century. To be fair it was not very different from the formation in San Fernando in Madrid: it was water of a duck’s back because since the 19th century Spain suffered from an impoverished artistic system, starved of nourishment although with some enlightened rescuers,  one in Cordoba, or the heroic galleries like Juana Mordó.It was not surprising that the most recalcitrant minds and comrades in experiments and free thinking would decide to escape from the conservative proposals in search of a context that offered greater possiblities of creative richness and a dialogue between peers.

The early decades of the 20th century were witness to an excentric art movement whose members were obliged to leave the country in order to fulfill their goals. Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Julio González were representative of this. The first Spanish vanguard art movement produced in the country that could consider itself on an equal footing with the contemporary art produced in France or the United States was the informalism of the 40s. This would arrive too late for José Guerrero who, just after the Civil war ended, would settle in New York and become part of the second group of North American abstract expressionist painters. The dispute with his teacher Gabriel Morcillo at the Granada School of Art where he was studying before he left his homeland is well-known.[3] When Guerrero returned to Spain at the beginning of the 60s, he did so because the  pop art movement had taken the lead in the United States. According to Manuel Fraga this particularity of the Spanish makes us different, meaning better. Guerrero would continue painting, exhibiting and selling his abstract art because in Spain informalism prevailed during the 60s.[4] The long shadow cast by informalism in Spain is, if possible, even more relevant in the case of Pepa Caballero because she never left Andalusia. We shall try to discover what she did while she stayed since we cannot guess her reasons for doing so.

During the 60s while she was studying, Pepa was painting from realist landscapes to allegorical figurative works with surrealistic overtones. There are also undated pieces of neo-deco with allegories of the life of a fisherman that might be coincidental with the work produced by the Estampa Popular movement. The images, and the abstracts to a greater degree for their semantic ambiguity, may  have been manipulated by the government in that environment of strong censorship but they may well have also been messengers of emancipation like those that can be seen, for example, in the work of the pop feminist Mari Chordà, Angela García Codoñer and Isabel Oliver. Although, unfortunately I have seen very little of her figurative work in the 60s a detailed analysis may offer future keys. This is the point of departure.

However, disregarding the artist’s student work, the exhibit commences with a figurative painting. This is an apparently three-dimensional  diptych that can be presented as a free-standing figure by the use of hinges that join both parts. It shows a nude female figure  being pushed backwards by a giant white ball. Painted in 1970 as a grisaille, this piece connects with the following series Grises —the black, white and grey palette— and use of acrylics as well as the white ball in the centre around which the work is composed. The ball renders the nude female figure incapable of movement, an iconography that María Lara considers coherent because «Pepe was very feminist although she was not an active member of the movement. She believed deeply in equality and cared little about the difficulties of being a woman in a man’s world».[5] I mentioned on another occasion that «Whether this be a metaphor of a creation that imbibes from the essentialist feminism common in the 70s or more literally is about the imponderables that pushed women backwards and prevented their advancement, the ball appears in the Grises series as a punctum in the Barthesian sense as the element round which everything turns».[6] I believe that this painting represents the change in Caballero’s direction, towards the abstraction that followed, with the elimination of any figurative element which, as I undertand it, she considered extraneous, reducing her work to a symbolic element, the meaning of which we may sense but that essentially is unkown to us.

In some of these pieces Pepa Caballero will continue to compound the idea and format of the still-life by placing the ball in a line that could represent a table, a horizonal containing space. Sometimes there are two spheres, at others there is just one isolated shape. Soon, however, this last figurative reference disappears. The ball appears suspended in time, breaking out as if the canvas were «giving birth». Caballero used shadows, an Renaissance artifice of pictoric illusionism, as an rhetorical element to support this figurative movement. Here, once again I must stress  the Granada painter’s heterodoxy or, to put it another way, the freedom she felt and how she made use of the different precepts learned during her formative years.

The next series in the exhibition —in reds and blues— belong in the linguistic sphere of abstraction. However, in some cases we can still recognise vestiges that appear to represent organic shapes that penetrate and are penetrated and which to me seem to have a sexual significance. These pieces are dated in 1972 and it is curious that she continued to limit her palette of colours: at first grey, black and white; later the grey became blue-grey in some paintings of night landscapes. From 1973 she launched ruthlessly on red, the colour which would dominate her work for the rest of the decade.

It is interesting to see that she was so comfortable with red, always accompanied by black, the palette that extends across Spanish informalism. I also examined her use of the hessian, less as a support for the paint but as a superimposed element,  some times stuck on and at others apparently sewn on. Hessian or burlap is a poor material, easily recognisable in the European informalism from Millares to Burri which Pepa Caballero used very differently, in some cases creating a minimalist work out of poor, recycled materials.[7]

In other acrylics, and envisaging her work in the 80s, she worked with a certain impure geometry, once again making use of shadows, folding the shapes as if they were malleable. The pieces have a very flat,washed effect,  with very diluted colours making them almost transparent. I continue to believe that the choice of this rigorous palette of colours is that of works created in the 50s in Spain that aimed  to preserve the abstract art legacy of the Spanish School of painting.

This series in red is rich in variations and new directions: experimenting with superimposing planes by glazing, working with organic elements or, on the contrary, moving along the path towards geometrics.  These works of Pepa Caballero of the 1970s  were pure experimentation, creative liberty and self knowledge of the plastic arts.[8]

Isabel Tejeda
CU Universidad de Murcia

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[1] One of her best friends at the time, María Lare told me how between June and September of 1964 they both sat for both the entrance exams, the drawing of a statue, and thewhole course exam. Caballero and María Lara shared flats in Estepona and Fuengirola from the end of the 60s until 1973 where Lara was a privileged witness to the creation of these first series. Telephone interview conducted with María Lara on 20/11/24.

[2]Ibíd.

[3] Artists in Pepa Caballero’s circle also left their homes; María Lara left to make her way in Madrid in the 70s. She had made a first attempt after finishing her studies  in 1969  at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid.

[4]

[5]Interview with María Lara. Op.Cit

[6]Isabel Tejeda“Un esbozo sobre los inicios artísticos de Pepa Caballero. Los años 60 y 70”, in Pepa Caballero. Constelaciones abstractas, Seville, CAAC, 2025.. 

[7]Isabel Garnelo told me that the sacking material came from Caballero’s parents’ grocery store.

[8]The Grupo Palmo was founded in 1978 in Malaga by Caballero and other colleagues. This heterogenous collective, until its disappearance a decade later, served to share, cooperate, organise exhibits or edit portfolios of graphic works; small actions that transformed and artistically stimulated the local scene.