Soledad Sevilla (Valencia, 1944) is one of Spain’s most highly respected artists. Throughout her career she has received several important awards, such as the National Visual Arts Prize in 1993, the Gold Medal of Merit in Fine Art in 2007 and the Arte y Mecenazgo Award in 2014. More recently, she was awarded the Velázquez Visual Arts Prize in 2020, which extolled her contribution to Ibero-American culture as “a pioneer in the experimentation with languages”. During her long-standing career, her academic and exhibition activity has been prolific and her work is to be found in major collections.

Realized mainly in painting and installation, her constantly changing output has nevertheless been absolutely coherent in terms of the concerns she addresses. Generally working across series, she investigates forms of representing immateriality as well as the way in which light, sound or smell can create an atmosphere and how to capture it.

Within the remit of a carefully conceived brand of abstraction, she explores art’s potential to facilitate an understanding of space, and how to recreate and inhabit it. This leads to extraordinary results of great beauty and harmony that combine geometry and lyricism, rules and sentiments.

Question. Since the seventies, your work could be framed within the context of . What motivated you to choose this language as your means of expression?

Answer. It was probably a reaction against the academic teaching we received at the School of Fine Art, which at the time had not yet been incorporated into the university. I was driven by a need to discover a more contemporary, more modern world.

Q. Your work straddles installation, one of the most versatile contemporary mediums, and painting, currently associated with a more conventional idea of art. The holdings of the BBVA Collection include your painting Number 1, from the site-specific project for Castillo de Vélez Blanco. What do you get from this dialogue between different disciplines which you have maintained throughout your career?

A. I am equally interested in both. On one hand, painting in the studio is very introspective while, on the other, installation means you must engage with other spaces where you have to make an intervention. In many instances, painting has derived into installation and vice versa.

Q. At the moment we are seeing more and more efforts to close the gender gap in the art world, to recover and reappraise women artists and thus create a much more diverse outlook. Who were your references when you started? Were there any women among them?

A. Yes, when I was starting out I greatly admired Carmen Laffón, and I still do today. There was an atmosphere in her painting that I wanted to capture in mine, and in fact, I told Carmen that I copied her. And among previous generations I was interested in María Blanchard and Niki de Saint Phalle.

Q. The current situation over the last year has emphasised culture’s eternal need to reinvent itself in order to adapt to changing circumstances. Have you found opportunities in the use of new technologies for artistic experimentation? As we have seen, in your practice the relationship between the actual work and the space where it is shown is fundamental. Do you see digital media as a tool to rethink the aesthetic experience? Is it possible to explore one of your installations in virtual reality?

A. I don’t believe so. In fact, I was using digital media as far back as the seventies but I lost interest in them, so you could say that I have actually travelled the opposite path. Although I worked for several years with the seminar on the automatic generation of plastic forms at the Computer Centre in Universidad Complutense de Madrid and the results were exhibited in various shows, I reached the conclusion that it was not a means of expression for me, and that I needed something more personal, more introspective, and so I gave up working with computers.