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José Otero Abeledo, Laxeiro, was born in Donramiro, Lalín (a town that belongs to Pontevedra, Galicia). -
He moved with his parents (María Josefa Abeledo and José Otero Fernández) to Botos, Vilamaior (a village very close of Lalín). He began to draw, motivated by the teachings of Teresa López, his teacher. -
He emigrates to Cuba with his family. In Cuba he attends drawing classes and works as an assistant to Manuel Roig, choreographer of the Teatro Martín. -
After working as a designer of artistic stained glass, he returned to Lalí, sick with tuberculosis. He decided to dedicate himself to painting professionally. That same year he oppened a barber shop in Lalín and began to be known as El pintor barbero, as he tirelessly drew clients and all kinds of popular characters. -
He was awarded a scholarship by the Lalín CIty Council to travel to Madrid to study Fine Arts at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. A year later he managed to extend his stay in Madrid thanks to a scholarship from the Provincial Council of Pontevedra. -
At just twenty-three years old, he composed what, together with he small cartoons painted by Castelao in 1921. Laxeiro had already travelled to Madrid to study as a free student at the royal Academy of FIne Arts of San Fernando. Carnavalada picks up on the tradition of Goya's Black Paintings, the tenebrism of Gutiérrrez Solana. -
He held his first solo exhibition at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in Santiago de Compostela. He amazed intellectuals and critics and began to talk about a revolutionary form of painting for Galicia in those years. -
He settled in Pontevedra as a drawing teacher at the Valle-Inclán Institute. He painted the famous mural El manantial de la vida, which can still be seen today in the Café Moderno in Pontevedra. -
Laxeiro closes his granite period, recreating an altarpiece pf characters that synthesizes all his imagination in the form of a portico that invites you to enter the afterlife, passing through a central door. -
He participated in the exhibition Fifty Years of Spanish Figurative Painting, organized by the Charpentier Gallery in Paris. -
Laxeiro died in Vigo on the 21st of July.