Soledad Sevilla was born in Valencia in 1944. She studied at the Reial Acadèmia Catalana de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi in Barcelona (1960-1965) but did not stop her learning there. Between 1969 and 1971, she participated in mathematician Ernesto García’s seminar on the automatic generation of plastic forms at the calculus centre of the Complutense University of Madrid. In 1979, she was awarded the Juan March Foundation Scholarship for Spain, and the Center for the Promotion of Plastic Arts and Research on New Expressive Forms’ Scholarship the following year. Between 1980 and 1982 she lived in Boston, after receiving a grant from the US-Spanish Joint Committee for Cultural and Educational Cooperation. At Harvard University, she benefited from the Technical Examination of Works of Arts study scholarship from the Fine Arts Department.
This experience in Harvard is when she started her Las meninas series, which can be summarised as a reinterpretation of Velázquez’s painting through the introduction of the grid compositional structure and a focus on atmosphere and spatiality. Upon Sevilla’s return to Spain, this spatial element was further developed in various environmental installations which continued to poetically borrow from the pictorial medium, and serve as a bridge with her personal pictorial practice, which is surprising considering how often both practices are contrasted as independent.
In the late 1990s, the grid disappears, but a certain geometric spatiality remains, through the vegetal motifs which subtly evoke Granada, a city with which Sevilla has been closely linked since the 1980s through her classes at the University of Granada. More recently, the window has entered her corpus as a central motif, pictorial space and concept, associated with wooden textures and metal surfaces. Technically, ephemeral materials (paper or neoprene) as well as video and photography now complement Sevilla’s pictorial language. Unfortunately, illness has forced the artist to reduce her scale, switching from spatial installations back to the canvas.
Sevilla’s first solo exhibition was held at the Soledad Lorenzo Gallery in Madrid in 1998 (she went on to collaborate with the gallery until its closure in 2012). Since then, she has accumulated both solo and group exhibitions. In more recent years, various retrospectives and comprehensive shows have been held in her honour: at the José Guerrero Center (2015); Genesis at the Marlborough Gallery in Barcelona (2017); Spaces of the Look at the Tomás y Valiente Art Center in Fuenlabrada, Spain (2018).
Recent shows include: Exposición colectiva: Visiones y expresiones (joint exhibition: visions and expresions) CaixaForum Barcelona, Contemporary Art Collection of the La Caixa Foundation (2007); Línea y plano (line and plane) (joint exhibition), Galería Antonio Machón Madrid (2007); Ideas y propuestas para el arte en España (ideals and proposals for art in Spain)(joint exhibition), Ministry for Culture, Madrid (2008); Bit Internationa. [Nove] Tendencije. Computer and Visual Research. Zagren 1961-1973 (joint exhibition) Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany (2008); Escrito en los cuerpos celestes (written on the heavenly bodies), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Madrid (2012); Retrospectiva (retrospective), Valencian Institute of Modern Art, Valencia (2019); Museo Patio Herreriano de Valladolid, Spain (2021).
Prizes include: Alfons Roig Prize (1977); National Award for Plastic Arts (1993); Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts (2007); Art and Patronage Award (2014); Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts (2020).
