Soledad Sevilla

SOLEDAD SEVILLA (Valencia, 1944).
Untitled. Insomnios Series, 2000.
Oil on paper.
It presents to the back label of ARCO.
Signed and dated in the lower left area.
Measurements: 73 x 58 cm; 84 x 69 cm (frame).
The series "Insomnios" of Soledad Sevilla constitutes one of the most intense and emotional sets within her trajectory, marking a turn towards a more organic, sensorial painting, linked to the inner experience. Developed mainly around the 2000s, this series is born from a personal experience, insomnia, which the artist transforms into a plastic language where darkness, light and mental perception are intertwined.
In these works, Sevilla partially abandons the stricter geometry of previous stages to enter into dense, almost vegetal compositions, built by means of wefts and reiterative brushstrokes. The pictorial surface becomes an unstable space, where forms seem to emerge and fade away, evoking that intermediate state between wakefulness and sleep.
Soledad Sevilla's artistic career began in the late sixties with positions close to pictorial minimalism, a stage she abandoned in the seventies after her participation in the Seminar on Automatic Generation of Plastic Forms developed at the Calculus Center of the Complutense University of Madrid. In it, the artist opted to create paintings of geometric roots where the module and its infinite variations on the pictorial plane emerge as a theme; however, it should always be kept in mind that her geometric constructions have a poetic reading, a feature that characterizes Sevilla's work even today. It is through geometric abstraction, also called optical art, that Sevilla resolves to flee from neo-figuration and Pop Art, movements that were triumphant in Spain.1 With time, her artistic concerns took another direction and the Valencian artist began to work in the field of conceptual and spatial research, the results being used at the beginning of the eighties in her various installations. In the early 1980s she studied at Harvard University. In 1993 he received the National Plastic Arts Award and in 2007 the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts. His work is part of such important entities as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Künstmuseum Malmö, the Marugame Hirai Museum of Contemporary Spanish Art in Japan, the European Parliament and Patrimonio Nacional.In 2018 his sculpture, painted methacrylate Untitled (1971-1972), was part of the exhibition The Power of Art, organized on the occasion of the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Spanish Constitution. Works from the Museo Nacional Centro de arte Reina Sofía were located in the seats of the Congress of Deputies and the Senate.