Image: Girona Museum of Art
The Museu d’Art de Girona is presenting ‘Concha Ibáñez. L’evocació del paisatge’, an exhibition devoted to the landscape work of Concha Ibáñez and timed to coincide with the centenary of her birth. Produced by the museum and curated by Elina Norandi, the exhibition runs from 18 June 2026 to 10 January 2027 at the Museu d’Art de Girona.
The exhibition is described by the museum as the first in Catalonia dedicated to Ibáñez since her death in Barcelona on 22 December 2022. Rather than offering a comprehensive retrospective, it focuses on the subject that occupied her most persistently: landscape. The presentation brings together significant examples from her best-known landscape series alongside representative works from other bodies of work.
Ibáñez’s landscapes were made from memory rather than directly in front of the motif. She travelled to the places she wanted to depict, producing numerous drawings, studies and photographs during her visits before returning to her studio in Barcelona. There, she reconstructed each location through what she called ‘series’. Although she repeatedly revisited particular sites, these groups of works were not conceived exclusively to be exhibited or sold together.
The museum characterizes her approach as a practice of construction, artifice and synthesis rather than naturalism or straightforward reality. Ibáñez worked within a restricted palette, assigning distinctive colour ranges to the places she remembered. Her paintings approach abstraction without abandoning the identifying force of landscape, a tension that the exhibition uses as its central focus. She also maintained this serial approach in her printmaking and ex-libris work, including the lithographic and intaglio techniques to which she devoted substantial attention.
Ibáñez was born in Canet de Mar, Barcelona, on 12 March 1926 and grew up in Barcelona’s Clot neighbourhood. While working as a dressmaker, she attended an art school in Poblenou and later studied at Barcelona’s Escola d’Arts i Oficis Artístics Llotja between 1946 and 1959. She also frequented the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, where she participated in life-drawing workshops and later served on several governing boards. She regarded 1960, the year of her first exhibition at Barcelona’s Sala Jaimes, as the beginning of her professional career.
Ibáñez subsequently held exhibitions in Catalonia, elsewhere in Spain and internationally, including in Brussels, New York, Bangkok, Austria and Cuba, according to the museum’s biography. Her travels also included repeated visits to Morocco in search of desert landscapes. Among the sites that drew her attention was the Chouara tannery, one of the emblematic places in Fez’s medina, whose visual and chromatic rhythm informed her response to the landscape. The Girona programme includes commented visits, family painting workshops, a catalogue presentation on 4 October, and a roundtable on 12 December before closing on 10 January 2027.
