Basic Info

Name: Soledad Sevilla
Country of Origin: ES

Description

biography and image are courtesy of the artist’s website:
“Born in Valencia in 1944.

She studied at the Sant Jordi School of Fine Arts in Barcelona between 1960 and 1965.

Between 1969 and 1971, she participated in the Seminar on the Automatic Generation of Plastic Forms at the Computing Center of the Complutense University of Madrid. In the 1970s, her pictorial work used geometry as a normative basis.

In 1979, she received the Juan March Foundation Scholarship for Spain and in 1980, the Center for the Promotion of Plastic Arts and Research in New Expressive Forms Scholarship.

Between 1980 and 1982, she lived in Boston, after receiving a Fellowship from the Joint Hispanic-American Committee for Cultural Affairs.
At Harvard University, she held another specific scholarship for further studies: the Technical Examination of Works of Arts, Fine Arts Department. It was there that she began working on the Las Meninas series, applying a basic grid-like structure to reinterpret the spaces and atmospheres of Velázquez’s painting.

Upon her return to Spain from the United States, she created several environmental installations, all with a marked yet subtle pictorial character, which propose a profound visual renewal, as in Leche y sangre (Milk and Blood), where the gallery walls, covered with red carnations, appear white once the flowers wither.

The following series, titled La Alhambra (The Alhambra), is a reinterpretation of the Nasrid palace. In this case, the use of color is more measured, although the grid also serves as a reference point. To conclude this project, she created the installation Fons et Origo (Flowers and Origo), which recreates the nocturnal atmosphere of the reflections on the pond in one of the Alhambra’s courtyards.
In 1998, she held her first exhibition at the Soledad Lorenzo Gallery, where he worked as a gallery artist until its closure in 2012.

In her subsequent installations and painting series, light became the central element. In 1992, he created a projection on the bare walls of the courtyard of Vélez Blanco Castle (Almería), allowing a new view of the Renaissance portico currently in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In other installations, she used copper and cotton threads that, through appropriate lighting, recreated the effect of beams of light. In a later piece, drops of water slowly descended through the copper threads.

In 1993, she received the National Prize for Plastic Arts.

Her installations maintain a close relationship with her painting series. Towards the end of the 1990s, the grid disappeared, but a certain geometric idea of ​​wall and space remained, through the vegetal elements and the shapes of the leaves, subtly evoking Granada, a city with which Soledad Sevilla has had close ties from the 1980s to the present day, through her university classes.

She received the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts and the José González de la Peña, Baron de Forna Award, awarded by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, in 2007.

In 2007, she gave a lecture at the Prado Museum as part of the program “Enfoques” (Approaches to the Focus of Her Series: Las Meninas, The Apostles of Rubens, and Atalanta and Hippomenes).

Her most recent works have addressed the form of the window as a pictorial space and also the textures of wood and metal surfaces. The series on Rubens’s The Apostles and Altarpiece are two large-scale works that showcase this treatment of wood textures.

She participated in the 2010 Pontevedra Biennial.

She created an installation at the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid’s Retiro Park that reproduces the interior architecture of the palace as well as the celestial vault. The title Written on Celestial Bodies alludes to the punctuation marks printed on the membrane that forms the piece, a work completed in 2011/2012.

In 2013, she inaugurated the MAS R Gallery season by creating three different works that adapted to the spatial characteristics of each. Using ephemeral materials such as paper and neoprene, she experiments with three-dimensional pieces that are later repeated in metal. Video, as a complement to the pictorial language, as well as photography, are present in these latest works. It could be said of her current painting that she recreates a “soft geometry,” maintaining a constant in her work, repeating a unit and, through accumulation, it disappears to create larger planes.

In 2014, she received the Art and Patronage Award. The award recognizes the excellence of her work, her achievements throughout her career, and her involvement in the development of her career. Her work represents a significant contribution to the development of contemporary art and places her as a reference in the field.

In 2015, she held the exhibition Variations of a Line at the José Guerrero Center, which reviews her work from the 1960s to the 1980s, and the installation Casa de Oro, which transforms the patio of a Moorish house in the Albaicín. She also participated in the exhibition”