SOLEDAD SEVILLA
Valencia, (Spain) 1944

After finishing her training at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Jorge in Barcelona in 1964, she came into contact with Jordi Teixidor and José María Yturralde and joined the circles of normative art and technological art that exhibited in the group show Antes del Arte III: Series Matemáticas at the Galería Eurocasa in Madrid in 1968. The following year she presented her first solo exhibition at the Galeria Trilce in Barcelona. Between 1969 and 1971 she took part in the seminars on the “Generación automática de formas plásticas” at the Computer Centre of Madrid University, where she investigated the modulus as a form-generating element. In the early seventies she regularly exhibited in Madrid and Seville, while still participating in the group exhibitions of the geometrical group based in Madrid, including The Computer Art Exhibition & The European Systems Engineering Symposium (Madrid, 1971), Tendencije 5 (Zagreb, 1973), Pintores constructivistas españoles (Madrid, 1975), Forma y Medida en el Arte Español Actual (Madrid, 1977). In the mid-seventies she stopped working on the modulus and concentrated on analysing structures on the plane. In 1976 she had her first solo exhibition abroad, at the Galleri Ferm in Malmö. In 1978 a major exhibition of her work was held at the Dirección General del Patrimonio Artístico in Madrid.

In 1980 she went to live in Boston for two years. When she returned to Spain she started on the series Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour), in which she maintained her interest in the grid, the line and colour in her exploration of space. Although she had experimented with the medium in Boston, in 1984 she created her first installation, El poder de la tarde (The Power of the Afternoon), at the Galería Montenegro in Madrid. While not giving up painting –Alhambra, Los toros (The Bulls)- she continued with the activity of installation until the end of the decade and intensified it in the nineties. Water, smoke and time, always metaphors of the ephemeral, became central elements in these works, with light as a vehicle for lyrical construction and the line as a structuring matrix. The series En ruinas (In Ruins), 1993, marked a change in her production of paintings, with colour beginning to dominate the line in terms of defining spatial fields. She was awarded the National Visual Arts Prize in 1994, and the following year the Palacio de Velázquez presented a major retrospective of her work. In 1996 she was awarded the Alfons Roig Prize by the Provincial Delegation of Valencia.