Loló Soldevilla
Loló Soldevilla (b. in Cuba 1901 - 1971) Loló Soldevilla is considered a seminal figure in Concrete Cuban art. Soldevilla began painting in 1948, and in 1949 traveled to Paris where she encountered contemporary European avant-garde artistic practices — namely, abstraction. Upon her return to Cuba in 1956, Soldevilla and Pedro de Oraa founded Galeria Color-Luz, a gallery solely dedicated to the promotion of abstract art. A few years she later began exhibiting with the group Diez Pintores Concretos, which included artists such as Sandú Darié, Jose Mijares and Rafael Soriano. In 1951, Soldevilla exhibited in Art Cubain Contemporain at Paris' Musée National d'Art Moderne. Soldevilla's artistic practice encompasses painting, drawing and collage works. Similar to other Cuban Concretists, Soldevilla rejected the nationalist figurative work of the Vanguardistas and sought to employ a more international abstract vernacular.
“The work by Loló Soldevilla is particularly sui generis and innovative within the Cuban cultural context, as she is one among a rather small group of women whose talented entrance into the creative horizon of the 1950s deserves a prominent place. With her inventive and irreverent spirit, Loló was at the avant-garde of incessant formal searches that created a unique and innovative language and offered an array of infinite possibilities to our region. In a little more than twenty years of tireless work, Loló was able to inscribe her name in the history of the European avant-garde from the postwar, and in the evolution of Cuban abstract art. Beyond the times she lived in, the work by Loló Soldevilla was without a doubt the forerunner of many things to come and, therefore, it is only right to recognize her today for what she was: a stone thrown to the water that created on its path an infinite number of ripples, infinite circles, infinite echoes. Her efforts to renovate collage, her daring experiments on the utilization of diverse and heterogeneous materials, and her desire to improve the artistic and functional value of pure forms, transformed her name into an accurate and irrefutable representation of the Cuban contribution to universal painting”.
Fragment retrieved from the essay “The imaginary world of Loló Soldevilla” by Elsa Vega-Dopico.
