Pepi Sánchez

Josefa Sánchez Díaz started at the age of 12 when she joined the Santa Isabel de Hungria School of Fine Arts, in Seville.

Later, however, these same teachers were to feel disappointed when, after finishing her training, she left the mainstream Realism, which she mastered, to start a new path, breaking away from the established styles.

Challenged by the dominant traditionalism, "She began working at what was starting to be called 'Modern Art', and refused to submit to the interfering past", declared José María Moreno Galván[1] at the presentation of her first individual exhibition in Madrid (1954).

With remarkable imagination, she filled her works with legendary and fantastic characters, amazing oneiric landscapes and, as if in a guide to the interpretation of dreams, the titles she presented to the public that were both enigmatic and enlightening, as of an invitation to try to decipher this personal and magical world.

In her iconographic repertoire we find angels, children, magical animals, princesses, legendary monsters, inhabitants of impossible landscapes and structures that transport us to our childhood memories and joyful dreams.

But we also find fighting feminists, rejected princes, caryatids tired of being so, and dying stars, conveying messages that, without affecting the gentleness of her style, can still be critical and forceful.

Directly seeing Giotto, Mantegna, Paolo Ucello, Piero Della Francesca frescoes and all the Italian art that she had admired for years through books and photographs, left an indelible imprint.

Open to everything that meant renovation and modernity, after finishing her training, she broke with the official academic-ism and joined an avant-garde group called "Young Sevillian School of Painting and Sculpture".

Being the mother of a large family with all the responsibilities and work entailed, did not stop her from devoting herself to her art with courageous perseverance.

Her singular imaginative world has been a source of inspiration to her husband and many other poets and writers, who have written about her and her art: Manuel Alcántara, Montserrat del Amo, Marcelo Arroita-Jáuregui, Alfonso Canales, Antonio Enrique, Francisco Garfias, Antonio Hernández, Luis Jiménez Martos, Antonio Leyva, Manuel Mantero, Joaquín Márquez, Rafael Montesinos, Rafael Morales, Federico Muelas, Digna Palou, Fernando Quiñones, José María Requena, Mariano Roldán and Lázaro Santana are among them.