PARIS.- Perrotin Paris is presenting Lorquianas, a solo exhibition of new large-scale paintings and works on paper by Cristina BanBan, the Spanish-born, New York-based artist’s fourth show with the gallery. Originally debuted in May 2025 as part of the artist’s first institutional exhibition at the Alhambra’s Museum of Fine Arts in Granada, Spain, the exhibition travels to Paris with works from the Granada presentation alongside new pieces created for this iteration.
Lorquianas is BanBan’s most ambitious project to date. It was initiated through an invitation for the artist to engage with the life and legacy of Federico García Lorca in his hometown of Granada. The poet’s enduring presence in Andalusian cultural memory—and his emotionally charged, archetype-rich characters in works such as Yerma, The House of Bernarda Alba, and Blood Wedding—form the conceptual foundation of the exhibition.
At the heart of Lorquianas is a series of large-scale paintings that respond to the emotional and symbolic complexity of Lorca’s universe. In Yerma (all works 2025), BanBan draws from Lorca’s 1934 tragedy of the same name, in which the protagonist—trapped by cultural norms around womanhood and fertility—is slowly undone by her childlessness. BanBan translates this tension through two interdependent figures: one grieving and slumped, the other upright and statuesque. Set against intersecting fields of green, brown, and blue, the figures contrast in scale and tone yet remain tethered by a shared vulnerability. Their relationship evokes not just maternal longing, but also emotional duality, repression, and resignation—core themes in both the play and the painting.
Luto y ajuar explores a generational dynamic also central to Lorca’s vision of Spanish womanhood, particularly in The House of Bernarda Alba (1936), a play where five daughters live under the suffocating authority of their mourning mother. BanBan’s canvas stages a similarly charged contrast: older women dressed in black sit facing younger ones, whose gestures hover between confrontation and deference. Vibrant stockings and domestic props—red and yellow chairs, bare thighs—create a visual tension between solemnity and sensuality, echoing Lorca’s interest in how tradition and desire collide within the home.
Other paintings draw more obliquely from Lorca’s symbolic vocabulary. In Multitud, BanBan conjures a masked, theatrical procession spanning ages and identities, reminiscent of Lorca’s deep interest in popular Andalusian festivals, and the carnivalesque staging found in his tragicomedias. A jug, which might double as a funerary urn or a vessel of life, nods to Lorca’s use of domestic objects as metaphors for fate.
The paintings Venus and Clown, two vertically elongated paintings, form a kind of diptych exploring dualities—fertility and artifice, sensuality and absurdity—set against textured, pulsating fields of color. Venus, with its primordial nudity, alludes to archetypes that predate Lorca, yet its gestural force and mythic resonance speak to his ongoing influence. Clown, at once theatrical and inscrutable, plays with the idea of masking and performance, themes Lorca explored both in his characters and in his own public persona.
Among the new paintings created for the Paris presentation are La Zapatera Prodigiosa, Muchachas de Agua, and Clown II, each of which deepens BanBan’s dialogue with Lorca’s symbolic universe. La Zapatera Prodigiosa takes its title from Lorca’s 1930 play The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, a satirical work that confronts the strictures of marriage and the social gaze. BanBan translates its tensions into corporeal form, amplifying the shoemaker’s wife’s defiance and restlessness through figures that strain against the frame, at once monumental and vulnerable. Muchachas de Agua evokes the poet’s fascination with elemental forces. Here water as both life source and uncontrollable current, she renders a group of women whose fluid, overlapping bodies suggest transformation and the pull of destiny. In its sensual currents, the painting recalls Lorca’s own drawings of male sailors, works often read as queer allegories of longing and identity. Clown II continues BanBan’s interest in theatrical archetypes: with its elongated figure poised between comedy and melancholy, the canvas conjures the performative masks Lorca both wore and unmasked in his own writings, pointing to the tension between spectacle and interiority. Together, these new works reaffirm BanBan’s capacity to reimagine Lorca’s oeuvre not as static references, but as living energies—figures that embody desire, struggle, and metamorphosis in a contemporary idiom.
Though based in New York, BanBan’s visual vocabulary is deeply informed by her early years growing up in Barcelona and her connection to the cultural rhythms of Spain. Her engagement with Lorca’s writing—through its symbolism, emotional intensity, and capacity for myth—has resulted in a body of work that honors his legacy while staking out new aesthetic territory. These paintings do not illustrate Lorca’s texts but absorb and reimagine his atmospheres, staging parallel dramas in a contemporary key.
