Carmen Laffón was a figurative sculptor and painter. She was one of the leading figures in Spanish realism in the second half of the 20th century, producing lyrical, intimate works in the form of landscapes, still-lifes and portraits. She began painting at a very early age, under the guidance of painter Manuel González Santos. She then attended the Santa Isabel de Hungría School of Fine Arts in Seville (1949-1952) before going on to the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, where she graduated in 1954. She rounded out her training first in Paris and later at the Spanish Academy in Rome (1955-1956) under a grant from the Ministry of Education.

Laffón blurs the boundaries between painting, drawing and scupture, focusing on capturing light and on changes in colours in her motifs. From the late 1950s onwards, her paintings depicted the landscapes of the River Guadalquivir, from La Cartuja to Sanlúcar de Barrameda and Doñana National Park. She also painted her daily surroundings, especially her estate La Jara, in series produced over long periods of time that incorporated tradition and modernism, with influences ranging from the landscape art of Camille Corot to the abstraction of Mark Rothko. She painted subtly atmospheric scenes that tended compositionally towards minimal structures and a blurring of forms, but were always firmly linked to her profound observations of reality. Examples include series such as The Reserve From Sanlúcar, which she began in the 1980s in the form of small pastels, and a series of large-format oil paintings produced between 2005 and 2014. From the 1990s onwards she also worked in sculpture, spurred by her interest in the everyday and in objects per se, bringing motifs together by painting their surfaces so that they became expanded paintings. Examples include recent series themed around vines and lime.

Laffón is associated with a group of artists centred on the El Taller studio (1967-1969), especially Teresa Duclós and José Soto, and with the La Pasarela Gallery in Seville. In the mid 1960s she joined the artists associated with the Juana Mordó Gallery, where her work was exhibited in 1967. In 1992 the Reina Sofía in Madrid staged the first retrospective of her work. She later held solo exhibitions at the Amós Salvador Gallery (Logroño, 1996), the Casa del Cordón Cultural Centre (Burgos, 2001), the Rodríguez-Acosta Foundation (Granada, 2006) and the Andalusian Centre for Contemporary Art (Seville, 2014-2015), among other venues. In 1982 she won the Culture Ministry's National Award for Plastic Arts; in 1999 she won the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts and in 2000 she became a numerary member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. In 2013 she was designated a "favourite daughter of Andalusia".

Roberto Díaz