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

Luis Ángel Rojo Duque graduated as a lawyer and state commercial expert in 1957, and joined the Technical Secretariat General of the Ministry of Trade, where he helped with the preparatory work for the stabilisation plan of 1959. In 1961 he obtained a degree in Economics from the University of Madrid. He extended his studies at the London School of Economics (1961-1962) and obtained a PhD in Economics in 1963. He joined the Faculty of Economics and Political Science as a lecturer in 1959 and secured tenure as an assistant lecturer in Economic Theory in 1964. In 1966 he obtained a professorship, in which he was accredited as a master economist.

In 1971 he was appointed Director General of the Studies Service of the Banco de España. He held this post until 1988. He set in motion a far-reaching renovation of the department. He set up Spain's new monetary control system, which proved capable of addressing the inflationist stresses in the country's economy. On a personal basis, he was also a member of the UN's Committee for Development Planning from 1983 to 1987.

As Deputy Governor of the Banco de España (1988-1992), he watched over the setting up of monetary policy under the European Monetary System, which Spain joined in 1989. He was appointed Governor in 1992 and reappointed in 1994, following the approval of the Law on the Autonomy of the Banco de España. His mandate saw the introduction of the new monetary policy set-up drawn up in the wake of the autonomy legislation, and the reinforcing of the strategy for macroeconomic stability. In 1994 he was appointed Deputy President of the European Monetary Institute. He was a member of the Governing Board of the European Central Bank from 1998 to 2000. At the end of his mandate, ECOFIN appointed him as a member of its Group of Wise Men for the study of the integration of European financial markets.

His writings include essays and books which have been used as reference works in training subsequent generations of economists. He made especially significant contributions to knowledge of microeconomics and Keynesian economics in Spain. He had papers published in high-profile, high-impact academic journals, especially on the theory and practice of monetary policy and on economic thinking. As a social scientist he advocated seeing economics as an empirical science, always set against the background of the history of social thinking and economic history.

He was appointed a member of the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Science (1984) and the Spanish Royal Academy (2003), and a patron of the Foundation of Friends of the Museo del Prado, of which he later became the Vice President (1985-1994). He received awards including the first King Juan Carlos Award for Economics in 2006.

Paloma Gómez Pastor