Background
Soledad Sevilla was born in 1944 in Valencia, Comunidad Valenciana, Spain.
Soledad Sevilla was born in 1944 in Valencia, Comunidad Valenciana, Spain.
Soledad studied at the School of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi in Barcelona between 1960 and 1965. She also participated in the Seminary of automatic generation of plastic forms of the Computing Center of the Complutense University of Madrid between 1969 and 1971. In 1979 she received the Juan March Foundation Scholarship for Spain and in 1980 the Scholarship Center for the Promotion of Plastic Arts and Research in New Expressive Forms. Between 1980 and 1982 Soledad resided in Boston, after receiving the Scholarship of the Joint Hispanic American Committee for Cultural Affairs. At Harvard University she enjoyed another specific Scholarship to study: Technical Examination of Works of Arts, Fine Arts Department.
On her return to Spain from the United States, Soledad made various environmental installations, all of them with a marked, but subtle pictorial character, that posed a profound plastic renovation, as in "Milk and Blood", where the walls of the gallery, covered with red carnations, appeared white once the flowers fade. The following series entitled "The AlhambraIt" constituted a work of reinterpretation of the Nasrid palace. In that case, the use of color was more measured although the grid was also a reference base. The closing of that project was the installation of "Fons et Origo" that tended to recreate the night atmosphere of the reflections on the pond of one of the courtyards of the Alhambra.
In 1998 Soledad made her first exhibition at the Soledad Lorenzo Gallery, where she worked as an artist until its closure in 2012. In its successive installations and pictorial series, light became the central element. In 1992 she made a projection on the bare walls of the courtyard in the Castillo de Vélez Blanco, which allowed to visualize again the Renaissance portico that is currently in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In 1993 she received the National Prize of Plastic Arts.
Her installations maintain a close relationship with her pictorial series. Towards the end of the 90s the grid disappeared, but there remained a certain geometric idea, of wall and space, through the vegetal, of the forms of the leaves, which subtly evoked Granada, a city with which Soledad Sevilla has been very linked since the 80s to the present and through her classes at the University. The Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts and the José González de la Peña Award were awarded to her in 2007.
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"The Apostles of Rubens" and "Retablo", are two works of great dimensions in which this treatment of wood textures is shown. Soledad also participates in the Pontevedra Biennial of 2010. She made an installation in The Crystal Palace of the Madrilenian Retreat that reproduced the architecture of the palace in addition to recreating the celestial vault. The title "Written in the celestial bodies", alludes to the punctuation marks printed on the membrane that forms the piece, work done in 2011 - 2012.
In 2013 she inaugurated the MASR Gallery season, developing three different works that were adapted to the spatial characteristics of each of them. With ephemeral materials such as paper or neoprene, the pieces were tested in three dimensions and then repeated in metal. Video as a complement to pictorial language, as well as photography were present in those latter works. In 2014 she received the Arte y Mecenazgo award. The award recognizes the excellence of her work, the achievements in her career and the involvement in the construction of her career. Soledad's work represents a significant contribution to the development of contemporary art and places it as a benchmark in the sector.
In 2015, at the José Guerrero Center, she carried out the exhibition Variations of a line that reviewed her work from the 60s to the 80s and the Casa de Oro installation that transformed the patio of a Moorish house in the Albaicín. She also participated in the exhibition Nada temas in the National Museum of Baroque Sculpture in Valladolid with the site specific piece "It would be the one of the night."
Soledad also participated in the collective exhibition Yesterday and today the labyrinth of time at the Marlborough gallery in Madrid in 2017, and exhibited at the Passevite gallery in Lisbon the Pessoa project "Las rutas del desasosiego", work developed from the "Book of Disquiet." "Génesis" was the title of the exhibition at the Marlborough gallery in Barcelona, a review of her work from the 60s to 2017.
In 2018 she made the exhibition "Espacios de la mirada a amplia" in the Tomás y Valiente Art Center of Fuenlabrada, the retrospective of her work where people can see her most important series since the 70s to the present, as well as some of her installations.
Each of Seville's works explores relationships between light, matter, and space; it combines analytical rigor and geometric order with the search for a sensory and organic experience.
Quotations:
"We artists produce, we work... a lot of this does not come to public light, it gives the impression that it does not transcend..."
"The time came when I was unable to cover large formats due to my physical condition. It was then that I decided to approach the canvas in a different way, in stages, with small brushstrokes that are repeated until that unit disappears. I still use this system because I find it comfortable. All the changes in my work coincide, curiously with changes in my physical state. Never, anyway, I raise it in a rational way. Nature imposes its rhythm and I simply adapt. I abandoned geometry because I could not physically encompass it."