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Valencia-born artist Soledad Sevilla wins 2020 Velázquez Award for Plastic Arts
Soledad Sevilla (b. Valencia, 1944) has just won the Velázquez Award for Plastic Arts, an award presented annually by Spain's Ministry of Culture since 2002 for visual art works in any form by Iberian and Latin American artists. The prestige of this award in visual art is comparable to the Miguel de Cervantes Prize for literature. To mark the occasion, we present a look at the works by Ms. Sevilla in the Banco de España Collection. She is also the winner of the 1993 National Award for Plastic Arts and the 2007 Gold Metal for Merit in Fine Arts.
Most of the works by Soledad Sevilla in our collection date from the 1980s, when her work was shifting towards geometrical themes. The origins of that change can be traced to her time in the USA between 1980 and 1982. It was there, far from her own culture in geographical terms, that she re-encountered a key work in the history of Western painting: Velázquez's Las meninas.
Soledad Sevilla: Las meninas V (1982)
Her oil painting Las meninas V (1982) directly references Velázquez's masterpiece, and is part of a series that she produced under the same title between 1981 and 1983. It marks the beginning of a close examination of history which shows up again in her later works, such as those dedicated to the Alhambra, Vélez Blanco castle and the paintings of Rubens. In Las Meninas she is interested not in the figures or the stories intertwined on the canvas but in the space where the scene takes place, which is shaped by the intangible element of light.
Soledad Sevilla: Belmont VII & Belmont VIII (1982)
Her set of sketches on paper Belmont can be seen as a forerunner of the Las Meninas series. The Bank also owns three of those sketches: Belmont VI, Belmont VII and Belmont VIII. Their title comes from the neighbourhood of Boston where the artist lived and sought to capture the atmosphere created by the varied, tenuous colours of its buildings. In both the Belmont sketches and Las Meninas V, Sevilla introduces a poetic, emotional component that seeks to draw the viewer in. This is characteristic of her paintings and her installations alike, throughout her highly successful career.
Soledad Sevilla: Running over Reason (1991)
Further evidence of this can be found in the other work by Soledad Sevilla in the Banco de España Collection: Running over Reason (1991). This large triptych marks a new field of experimentation in her work, in which grid patterns were gradually replaced by minimalist abstraction. This phase culminated in installations and canvases in the 1990s inspired by the poetry of ruin and the wall.