Across her career, the painter Soledad Sevilla (Valencia, 1944) has developed a rigorous language based on the purity of line and colour and the construction of forms rooted in geometric modules. This exhibition, curated by Isabel Tejeda, chronologically parses the artist’s trajectory by exploring more than a hundred works, stretching from the early part of her career in the University of Madrid’s Computing Centre to her current output, some of which has been made specifically for this occasion. The retrospective underscores the artist’s assertion that she has painted the same painting her whole life, connecting her early works in the 1960s with recent series such as Horizontes blancos (White Horizons) and Esperando a Sempere (Waiting for Sempere), in which she pays homage to an inspiration and friend, Eusebio Sempere.

Despite her ties to a diverse group of Spanish artists affiliated with the aesthetic premises of geometric abstraction — with whom she has maintained an affinity throughout her life — Sevilla would soon move away from the use of computers as a visual tool. From 1980 to 1982 she spent time in Boston, a key juncture in the development of her career and the place where she would realise, along with other projects, the series Keiko, Stella and Belmont, made up of drawings of single, thin and faint lines that extolled the feeling of vibration that would subsequently be a strong characteristic of her later paintings. Upon her return, lines, weaves and light channelled emotion, leading her to work on two decisive landmarks in Spanish culture, Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas and the Al-Andalus architecture of the Alhambra in Granada, the city where she lives today.

Towards the mid-1990s, accumulated brushstrokes would start to pervade her canvases rhythmically — for instance in En ruinas II (In Ruins II) and Díptico de Valencia (Diptych of Valencia) — as would nature. A “plant magma”, as Sevilla describes it, compresses the surface of the canvas to progressively reveal a strip of light, while the hanging vegetation, nights of insomnia — represented in her series Insomnios (Insomnia) — and agricultural architecture prompt the viewer to see the world through weaving. Woven leaves and plastic mesh inspired by the tobacco drying of la Vega de Granada.

The creation of installations, with which Sevilla expands her aesthetic concerns towards the spatial, has been another force line of her work since the 1980s. This exhibition documents some of her historical interventions, such as Vélez Blanco, made in the Vélez-Blanco Castle in Almería inside the framework of the Plus Ultra project, in conjunction with Expo ’92, or El tiempo vuela (Time Flies), a kind of vanitas that was first on view at the Soledad Lorenzo Gallery in 1998. Furthermore, the artist presents a new site-specific installation here in which she employs cotton thread to intervene in the space of the Museo.