Carmen Laffón
Seville 1934 - Sanlúcar de Barrameda 2021

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

Mariano Rubio Jiménez (Burgos 1931 - Madrid 1999)
Governor of the Banco de España 1984 - 1992

Mariano Rubio held a degree in Economics from the University of Madrid. In his student years he was jailed for his anti-Franco activism and had to flee to Paris, where he began a career at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). He returned to Spain in 1963 as head of the Economic Policy Office at the Treasury Ministry. During Mariano Navarro Rubio’s term as governor of the Banco de España, he was recruited by Ángel Madroñero as Deputy Director of the Studies Unit, which was reorganised and modernised under their leadership and provided with a full-time staff of specialist economists. From 1970 to 1972 he was Director General for Financial Policy, but he resigned from his post in protest at the military tribunals in Burgos. During the transition to democracy he joined Francisco Fernández Ordóñez's Social Democratic Party.

He rejoined the Banco de España in 1976, where he served as Deputy Governor from 1977 to 1984 under José María López de Letona and José Ramón Álvarez-Rendueles, and then as Governor from 1984 to 1992. In that period the financial system was thoroughly overhauled, the independence of the Banco de España was consolidated (under the 1980 Governing Bodies Act) and the groundwork was laid for Spain to join the Monetary Union (1986) and the European Monetary System (1989). Mariano Rubio played a major role in drawing up the Delors Plan.

His mandate started in 1977, coinciding with the outbreak of a banking crisis that lasted until the 1980s. At that time the Deposit Guarantee Fund and Corporación Bancaria were set up and restructuring policies and systems were set in place. One consequence of this was the concentration of banks due to the takeover of banks in crisis. In 1992 he was affected by the Ibercorp case, which led him to tender his resignation, though he eventually stayed on until the end of his mandate.

Paloma Gómez Pastor