Between mansions and silks
Margharet's large abstract canvases hang today as naturally on the walls of a mansion in Marbella as in an apartment on Park Avenue. Nebrissa, her most recent collection, is a tribute to her stay in the city of Lebrija, the ancient Nebrissa Veneria.
There are painters who work for a wall and painters who work for a world. The Catalan artist Margharet clearly belongs to the second group. Her large-format paintings, pieces capable of commanding an entire living room, a pictorial language that seems to know no borders.
Margharet's work is recognizable even before you read the signature. The artist has built a method of her own, letting texture and direct gesture stand in for traditional tools. The result is abstract compositions of an almost physical density, in which color is always accompanied by gold, in its many different tones, and becomes the absolute protagonist.
That monumental scale is not a technical whim but a conceptual decision. Margharet seeks to have the viewer left enveloped by the work. It is precisely that ambition that explains her presence in markets as demanding as Marbella and New York: collectors who seek pieces capable of carrying the visual weight of equally grand rooms, whether by the sea or against the Manhattan skyline.
“What matters most is that a painting should envelop whoever looks at it.”
Her collections are born of a real immersion in the territory that inspires them. The light of the Lower Guadalquivir, the historical weight of a city tied to Antonio de Nebrija, and the echo of Cádiz sunsets filter into a more earthen palette and into compositions that converse with Andalusian architecture without ever becoming literal.
Nebrissa thus becomes the natural next step in a career built on large formats and territories of her own, further proof that Margaret Manzano understands painting as a space that asks no permission to expand: it claims it, transforms it, and, finally, inhabits it.
Nebrissa Veneria: the origin of the name
Lebrija, the Sevillian town that gives the collection its name, was known in Roman times as Nebrissa Veneria. It is that ancient name that Margharet reclaims to title a series that seeks a dialogue between the clarity of the Lower Guadalquivir and Andalusian textile memory, lace, shawls, which the artist herself knows firsthand as a collector.
