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Concepción Ibáñez Escobar (Canet de Mar, 1926 – Barcelona, 2022) was known as Concha Ibáñez, is a contemporary painter and printmaker.

A specialist in landscapes, she painted different regions of Catalonia, Castile, Andalusia, the Balearics and the Canary Islands, Valencia, Greece and North Africa, Cuba and New York.

His illustrations in oil or engraving illustrated the works of writers such as Baltasar Porcel, Miquel de Palol i Felip, Marta Pessarrodona, Cesáreo Rodríguez-Aguilera or Josep Maria Carandell i Robusté.

Born in Canet de Mar, her family soon moved to Barcelona, ​​where Ibáñez studied painting with the painter Josep Oriol Baqué Mercader, and later painting, printmaking and drawing at the School of the Llotja, with artists such as the painter Francesc Labarta, often frequenting the artistic circle of Sant Lluc.

The first public showing of the works of Concha Ibáñez was a joint exhibition to help the families of political prisoners in the late forties. After stays in different cities in Italy, Madrid and Paris, in 1960 she had a solo exhibition in the Jaimes gallery in Barcelona and later in Abril gallery in Madrid. In later years she exhibited in different galleries in Girona, Figueres, Cadaques, Lleida, Tarragona, Sitges, Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, San Sebastian, Madrid, Milan (Italy), Vienna (Austria), Brussels (Belgium), La Havana and Holguin (Cuba) and New York (USA). She has work in a number of different museums, among which is MACBA in Barcelona.

She exhibited (1962-1969) and was a member of the organizing patrons of  (1962-1969) and was a member of the organizing patterning Mayo gallery in Barcelona. She exhibited her works at the Feminino gallery of contemporary art. She has received several awards, including Pintura Citutat de l’Hospitalet (1966); second prize from the Girona Council (1967); third prize in Pintura Hidalgo de Caviedes in the Rafael Zabaleta competition, in Jaén (1973); the Pintura Donart prize (1995); and the prize d’Arts Plàstiques del Museu from Marina de Vilassar de Mar (1997).

In 1992 she was invited to participate with a group of Catalan artists in the second International Festival of Women in Bangkok. In 1999 her exhibition “The Century of Women in the Mediterranean”, was organized by the Institut Català de la Dona.

Concha Ibáñez features prominently among the most representative plastic artists of her generation, such as Emília Xargay, Maria Assumpció Raventos, Maria Girona and Montserrat Gudiol. She has been a member of the group SOM 7 at the Associació de Dones Artistes de Catalunya (Association of Catalan Women Artists), along with Claude Collet, Teresa Costa-Gramunt, Lluïsa Garcia-Muro, Adelaide Murillo, Carme Riera and Núria Tortras.

Her work has a unique style. As journalist and critic Josep Maria Cadena says: “Concha Ibáñez is a landscape artist because she wants to understand the world as a whole. She could depict other aspects of daily life, but vision consists of different landscapes that open roads leading to the concept of harmony”. Daniel Giralt-Miracle has praised her painting as a “synthesis of space, light, earth, nature and architecture within an integrated whole and sensitive to the specificities of each place.” According to Baltasar Porcel, “Concha Ibáñez, painter of landscapes, almost never paints a landscape: instead they serve as geographic accidents to exteriorize her personal conception of aesthetics and the soul”.

According to the critic Cesáreo Rodríguez-Aguilera, “with economy and safety, Concha Ibáñez has shaped her own forms and signs, has enriched her subjects, has given strength to the architectural direction of her painting, and has combined colour sparingly and with boldness”. Santos Torroella says that Ibanez “practices touch and the geometry of the art of painting with uncommon fervour, making a clear distinction in her works where everything is clear and serene, pure and precise but at the same time, soft and esteemed, done more sweetly than can be strictly captured plastically.”

The critic Josep Corredor Matheos holds that “Concha Ibanez has uniting, over time, two processes that seem contradictory: one of progressive abstraction and another of greater concreteness every day, focusing on a given piece of reality” . The Ràfols Dictionary summarizes her style: “her work, dedicated especially to landscapes, is made of solitudes and silences, simplicity resolved and coloured with sweetness, unfolding nuanced ways with a captivating poetic sensibility. The same can be said of her engravings, in the subtle gradation of greys that are allied with a sense of form, invariably sober and candid”.