Painter from Gran Canaria, one of the most important artists in the Canary Islands in the 20th century. Pioneer of abstract art on the islands.
Lola Massieu was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 1921, in a family of intellectuals and artists. She studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Las Palmas and then broadened her training in Madrid. Her first contact with painting was through academic figuration, but she was soon attracted to the abstract currents developing in Europe and America. In the 1950s she travelled to Paris, where she came into contact with informalism and lyrical abstraction, which would definitively transform her plastic language.
Her painting is characterised by a tension between the telluric and the cosmic: large masses of vibrant colour evoking volcanic eruptions, seabeds or galaxies. She participated in numerous international exhibitions and was recognised in her lifetime as one of the most singular voices in Spanish abstraction. Her work dialogues with masters such as Antoni Tàpies or Antonio Saura, but possesses an unmistakably Atlantic, island identity. She worked with mixed techniques, including acrylics, enamels and volcanic materials.
Lola Massieu received the Canarias Prize for Fine Arts and was the subject of major retrospectives at the Atlantic Centre of Modern Art (CAAM) in Las Palmas. She died in 2007 leaving a large body of work now held in public and private collections in Spain and internationally. The CAAM holds the most important collection of her production and has been the main promoter of her legacy. Her figure represents the bridge between the European avant-garde of the twentieth century and the Canarian artistic identity.