Galofré, Carmen

With a degree in drawing and painting from the Barcelona s Sant Jordi Fine Arts Faculty, Carmen Galofré, painter, astrologer and teacher of both disciplines, reflects on the human condition: what defines us as people, what shapes us and gives us freedom. Eager to understand and know one s own life, as well as the complex relationship between the inside and the outside, Galofré advocates mastery of the craft as a greater freedom of expression. And in this expression, the result of a very personal style, figuration and abstraction, tradition and modernity coexist in harmony, to connect with the audience, to move them, and to transmit what is so hard to express in words.

In Carmen Galofré's work there is a constant yearning to paint the intangible: the air, the atmosphere, the light, as in the Neoseries Anochecer from the year 2020. Accordingly, her work pivots upon perception, the emotion unleashed by observation. Her palette is harmonious, and she subtly uses various shades of white to achieve transparency, depth, volume and brilliance.

Her masterful command of painting materials and the feeling they convey is particularly noteworthy, so that viewers, without explicitly seeing it, can clearly distinguish porcelain from glass, leather from cardboard. Without directly painting glass, she knows how to extract the shine, reflections and transparency so that we can intuit glass without actually seeing it; yet another example of her skill in the game of perception.

Adroitly connecting her experiences and her inner reality, Carmen Galofré represents moments and scenarios of her daily life, people around her or whom she spontaneously meets on her travels, landscapes that move her and reflections on her own intimacy. Her interiors tell us about the artist s own inner world and her personal and psychological evolution. The inhospitable spaces of yesterday become tables with half-full glasses, desks with open books, side tables with vases of flowers, found objects...in short, vestiges of a full and intense life devoted to art with honesty and distinction. Her recurring areas of interest are compositions, nudes, spheres and planets, India and its landscapes, literature and marine.

Periodically, Carmen Galofré organises intensive painting courses, some of them abroad. These courses on pictorial process are intensely immersive. They are devised to place students firmly in the painter s mindset and enable them to see with unconditioned and fresh eyes. They develop the ability to observe and to tackle any subject; to connect with their inner urges; to express express their vision and to translate it to visible art, a painting.

In 1985, Galofré was awarded the gold medal in the Segovia landscape painting scholarship programme and two years later she received the Talens Award Spain.

Carmen Galofré has had several solo exhibitions in Barcelona, such as Entre Mundos at Sala Parés. She has been live painting in a series of concerts and held an exhibition at La Real Academia de San Jordi in 2014. As for group exhibitions, it is worth mentioning The Spirit of Barcelona at the David Messum Gallery in London in 2010 and Banque Heritage in Geneva in 2008 and 2009. Her work has been included in collections such as Fundació Vilacasas, Universitat Central de Barcelona and Fundació Banc Sabadell.