Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Las Meninas V

Image caption
SOLEDAD SEVILLA

Las Meninas V

  • 1982
  • Oil on canvas
  • 200 x 220 cm
  • Cat. P_311
  • Acquired in 1984
By:
Yolanda Romero Gómez

Soledad Sevilla worked with geometric patterns since the late 1960s, but the early 1980s marked a turning point in the process. This change can be traced to her sojourn in the United States from 1980 to 1982, where she studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. There, at a physical remove from her own native culture, she rediscovered a key work in art history, Velázquez's Las Meninas.

Las Meninas V (1982) is from the series of the same name painted by the artist between 1981 and 1983. It marks the inception of two features in her work: on the one hand, superimposed grids and her interest in representing space through its immaterial components; and on the other, a very precise way of looking at history, which was to be a recurrent theme from this time on, in works such as those on the Alhambra, the Vélez Blanco Castle and the painting of Rubens. What interests Sevilla about Las Meninas is not the characters, or the interlocking stories that take place in the picture, but the space —the place in which the scene plays out— which is configured through the immaterial element of light. This space is recreated from a superimposition of apparently endless grids, modulated by colour, which seek to reinterpret the space of Velázquez's painting.

One of the forerunners to her series entitled Las Meninas is a group of works on paper entitled Belmont, in which she tried to capture the atmosphere of the Boston neighbourhood in which she lived, with its subdued but varied colours, typical of the popular architecture of the place. In the three drawings from this group in the Banco de España collection and in her painting Las Meninas V, Sevilla introduces a poetic, emotional component that seeks to envelop the viewer and which was to become characteristic of both her pictorial work and her installations throughout her highly successful career.

Yolanda Romero Gómez

 
By:
Roberto Díaz
Soledad Sevilla
Valencia 1944

Soledad Sevilla studied at the School of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi in Barcelona (1960-1965) and later attended the Seminar on Automatic Generation of Plastic Forms in the Centre for Calculus in the Complutense University of Madrid (1969-1971). During this period, she produced pictorial work that took geometric rigor as its normative basis. In 1979, she was awarded a grant by the Juan March Foundation and between 1980 and 1982 she furthered her studies at Harvard University, Massachusetts with a scholarship from the Joint Spanish and North-American Committee for Cultural and Educational Affairs. There she began work on her series Las Meninas (1983). In it, she began for the first time to use a grid-shaped structure which she interposed onto the motif, developed in the background of the painting. In this case, she used the device to interpret the space, light and atmosphere of Velázquez's famous painting 'Las Meninas'. She went on to make a series entitled Alhambras (1984-1986), again using the grid structure to filter and establish the plays of light and shade cast by the architectural features of the Alhambra palace in Granada onto the canvas. Since then, she has combined her painting with installations, which she uses as an extension or projection of the pictorial into space. In these projects, light and shade become the central axes. This can be seen in her pieces made with light beams made of copper wire, in which the light creates the same grid effect as her pictorial series, playing with viewers' sensorial and corporal perceptions. At the end of the 1990s, she eschewed her grids for a more lyrical abstraction, with a clearly organic dimension, evoking natural elements, such as the vegetation-covered walls in her series Insomnias (2000-2003) and the wood and metal textures in her latest series, working towards a poetics of the temporary and transitory.

Her first solo exhibition was held at the Galería Juana de Aizpuru in Seville in 1964. Since then, her work has been shown regularly at various venues, most notably at the Andalusia Contemporary Art Centre (Seville, 1985); the Palacio de los Condes de Gabia (Granada, 1991); the Palacio de Velázquez, Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 1995); the Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea (Donostia/San Sebastian, 2000); the Valencia Institute of Modern Art (Valencia, 2001); the Palacio de Cristal, Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2011-2012); and the José Guerrero Centre (Granada, 2015). Throughout her professional career, she has received the National Award for Plastic Arts (1993), the Medal for Merit in Fine Arts (2007) and the Medal of the Academy of Fine Arts of Granada (2008), among other awards.

Roberto Díaz

 
«Soledad Sevilla», Galería Alençon (Madrid, 1983). «Memory: Soledad Sevilla, 1975-1995», Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. MNCARS (Madrid, 1995). «Soledad Sevilla: Variations on a Line, 1966-1986», Centro José Guerrero (Granada, 2015). «From Goya to our times. Perspectives of the Banco de España Collection», Musée Mohammed VI d'Art Moderne et Contemporain (Rabat, 2017-2018). «Soledad Sevilla. Rhythms, Grids, Variables», Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. MNCARS (Madrid, 2024-2025).
Julián Gállego Banco de España. Colección de pintura, «Catálogo de pintura del siglo XX», Madrid, Banco de España, 1985. Julián Gállego & María José Alonso Colección de pintura del Banco de España, «Catálogo de pintura del siglo XX», Madrid, Banco de España, 1988. Yolanda Romero & Isabel Tejeda De Goya a nuestros días. Miradas a la Colección Banco de España, Madrid & Rabat, AECID y FMN, 2017. Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.