Starting the New Year with 4 Female Painters We Love
One of our biggest New Year’s Resolutions? To continue introducing our clients to the work of great female painters!
There’s something magical about the start of the new year: a time in which we reflect on our best achievements and set new resolutions and goals for the year to come, feeling that we have the power to do better and better!
While at The Art Büro we have countless reasons to feel proud of the things we accomplished in 2021, one that makes us particularly happy is to have introduced our clients to the work of great female artists from the Catalan and Spanish art scene.
In 2022, this achievement will become the starting point for presenting the work of more wonderful female creators, whether they are established or at the beginning of their careers!
Not only are we committed to participating in the important change of our times - making sure the women of our beloved but often conflicting art world have the same opportunities as their male counterparts. But we have also found out in our advisory projects that several of our clients are particularly interested in discovering the work of female artists, from those who were neglected from the history of art, to the ones that, filled with passion, are making their way in the contemporary art world of today!
We can’t help but respond enthusiastically to this call. This is why we are dedicating this first blog post of 2022 to briefly presenting four female painters based in the charming city of Madrid, whose work we have the immense pleasure to introduce and offer to the luckiest amongst our clients. Through the medium of painting, the oldest form of art media, each has shaped her own visual language and found a voice to express her unique story.
Image by SOFIA MORO (EPS), published in El Pais
Soledad Sevilla
The terrific Soledad Sevilla (Valencia, 1944), a leading figure of so called “Post-Painterly Abstraction” and Op art in Spain, was one of the female artists who recieved the most enthusiastic reception at our our private exhibition Mirror to the City at Francesc Macià 10 at the end of the year. She happens to be one of our favourites too!
Known for both her rational-geometric abstract paintings and her more lyrical, organic pictorial compositions, she has also worked on large scale installations since the ‘80s. These three-dimensional works spark from her interest in the way light and space interact with each other yet remain strictly linked to her pictorial research.
Her artistic vocation emerged early on, challenging the severe education of a conservative family that would not make it easy for Soledad Sevilla to pursue her dreams of becoming an artist. And yet, for over 40 years she has been a relentless maker of art, balancing carving her path in the art world with being a caring mother of two children, at a time in which women were mostly expected to succeed only as housewives and family carers. In the context of the post-dictatorship “movida madrileña” of the ‘70s and the ‘80s, her other silent struggle, carried out with the elegance of her brush, was to assert the delicate beauty of her geometric abstract paintings in an art scene dominated by Pop Art and Figurativism. Deserved recognition of her artistic talent would only come later.
Awarded with the Premio Velázquez de Artes Plásticas (2020), the Premio Arte y Mechenazgo (2014) and the Golden Medal for Merit in Fine Arts (2007), in 2021 Sevilla has celebrated three solo shows at major Spanish art institutions - the Patio Herreriano Museum in Valladolid, the CAAC in Seville and the C3A in Córdoba, which came just after other recent exhibitions at the IVAM of Valencia and the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid. The great attention and admiration she has obtained in the last few years from art institutions and collections, comes as no surprise: finally Soledad Sevilla has the recognition she has deserved for a long time!
Image by JORGE PASTOR for Ideal.es
While art history makes up for another great female artist who was once overlooked, as art advisors we’re sharing a secret: now is the best time to acquire a work by this wonderful artist - as her prices might soon take off at lighting speed and become unattainable for most of us!
That said, we are particularly proud to have concluded 2021 by presenting and offering to our clients four of her most beautiful works in our last and surely most ambitious private sale pop-up showroom, Mirror to the City, at Francesc Macià 10.
Paula Valdeón Lemus
Like Soledad Sevilla, who moved to Madrid in the 1970s (the place to be for the artistic youth of the time), still today many young artists building their careers in the art world are choosing to live and work in the vibrant Spanish capital. Amongst them is Paula Valdeón Lemus (Villafranca de los Barros, Badajoz, 1992) one of the youngest of our favourite emerging talents from the Madrid art scene.
Gabriella and I had the chance to visit her studio during our last trip to Madrid, where she is currently working on a series of paintings to be presented at the prestigious Mexico City fair Zona Maco in February 2022.
Interested in the syncretism of the decorative elements that still inhabit and embellish our social spaces, she delves into the layered memory of the urban architecture that surrounds us today.
Her beautiful unframed paintings, made by applying acrylic on pieces of the precious Belgian linen raw canvas, while leaving portions of canvas naked, have irregular contours and are hung on the wall with simple nails. The modular geometric or semi-organic compositions in pastel colours (especially light pink and light blue), appear as precious contemporary tapestries that tell mysterious stories of past and present.
At first glance, her works seem to be an innocent and beautiful homage to the decorative patterns of Azulejos - the glazed ceramic tile-work found on the interior and exterior of churches, palaces and historic private house across the globe. Although it is true that these traditional ceramics make up the main subject of her paintings, her interest stems from her visual and conceptual research around this multi-millennial “ornament”, a vestige inherited from the past and still alive today. For Paula Valdeón, the Azulejos are a reminder of the entangled history of influences and exchanges, colonialism and conquests that ties Spain and Portugal to the Arab culture of North Africa and the pre-colonial cultures in Latin America.
The word “azulejo” comes in fact from Arabic, meaning 'small polished stone’, “an origin that still shows today in the interlocking curvilinear, geometric or floral motifs” explains Valdeón. The Portuguese exported them to the Azores, Madeira, and Brazil in the 17th century and the Spaniards introduced them to their American colonies. Like elsewhere in Latin America as well as in Mexico, as the centre of New Spain and the richest province of Spain's colonial empire, the culture of azulejos has been reappropriated and integrated with new patterns coming from the indigenous iconographies and Renaissance elements, resulting in colourful figurative design.
Her latest series is particularly inspired by her recent trip to Chiapas, Mexico, where she learned about the indigenous mythologies and handcrafts of the region, bringing this knowledge into her work both visually and conceptually.
“What most fascinates me about the pattern of the Azulejos is that they are a layered and intricate story of cultural syncretism”, shares Paula Valdeón. In her paintings she appropriates the different patterns, reinventing blends of cultures and conveying new visual stories.
Cristina Gamón
Cristina Gamón’s (Valencia, 1987) interest in the medium of painting, comes from a completely unique spirit. Another great emerging young artist who has been acknowledged through prizes and important acquisitions, Gamón has a genuine interest in the formal process of creating abstract chromatic compositions.
Escaping the logic of conceptualism, her formal research is intended to speak not to the mind, but to the soul and the emotion of the viewer through the language of form, colours and compositions. We recently organised a wonderful studio visit for one of our clients to her Madrid taller, where we discovered more about the poetic abstraction of her work.
Gamón’s paintings emerge from the immaterial fabrics of thoughts and dreams: “she does not paint what she sees, but rather conveys what she feels and dreams”, the late writer and journalist Mara Calabuig wrote of her a few years ago. And I couldn’t agree more. Coming from the sphere of abstract imagination, Gamón’s works require no rational understanding but rather a contemplative attitude to absorb the magic. Conveying a tension between peace and vertigo, her chromatic compositions are “liquid” mirages that catapult us into the constellation - or abyss - of the imagination.
While she mostly works on large format paintings striking for their whimsical yet serene beauty, she has recently created a series of small sized plexiglass boxes that enclose mesmerising abstract painting compositions in a variety of bright colours and tones.
The lyricism of Gamón ’s pairings is contrasted by her choice of materials: she does not paint on canvas but directly onto plexiglass sheets. She has found in this material her best ally to experiment with colourful pigments and abstraction. Plexiglass gives a contemporary feel to the most traditional art form - painting - while also lending a transparency to the surface of the artwork. Through this adoption, she has shaped a visual language that balances the warmth and feminine aspect of her pictorial compositions with a cold yet elegant element that brings her work into the space of the experimental.
Cristina Gamón recently presented her work in the context of the art festival Abierto Valencia 2021, where she received two acquisition prizes (Makma Magazine and the Juan José Castellano Comenge Foundation). This most recent achievement to a long list of awards received over the years, including the Reina Sofia painting and Sculpture Award and the Gold Medal of the BMW National Prize for Painting which she obtained when she was only 24 years old (the youngest artist to receive this important accolade).
Clara Cebrián
La Nave del Topo is the name of Clara Cebrián’s studio-home, a space designed by architect Pía Mendar which became known after being featured by AD España in 2020. It is here where Clara Cebrián’s playful and creative universe magically comes into being; where she fabricates a carefree world made of happy thoughts and sweet memories.
Excited by the eccentric character of her work, Gabriella and I thought it was time to meet the artist in person and discover that magical world from the inside.
Image from Artist’s Instagram
Born in Madrid in 1991, Cebrián has been experimenting across media - painting, drawing, collage, animation and digital art - while interpreting art as a way to tell ordinary and apparently mundane or “everyday” stories. Her magic lies in the capacity to give life and narratives to the most simple objects and situations.
For Cebrían, the simplicity of everyday life is a rich archive of untold stories that, in her hands, gain a completely new spirit and interesting angles. From a memory of last summer to a recipe for mashed potatoes, everything is worthy of being shown in a painting or a video.
Dominated by pastel and bright colours and intervened with crayons or charcoal drawings, Clara Cebrián’s paintings embrace a naïve, hand-crafted and child-like aesthetic in a very unique way!
Image by © Manuel Ocaña for AD España 2020
Image by © Manuel Ocaña for AD España 2020
In La Nave del Topo, paintings on canvas or paper are hung everywhere: layered on the walls and on clothes stands, piled inside cupboards and drawers. Each of them has a story to tell that is humorous and lighthearted, but also, somehow, mysterious.
I hope you are as enamoured with these four talented artists as I am. Their work looks incredibly special in any setting and many of our clients have also fallen in love with their pieces. It is truly a privilege to be able to visit an artists studio and enter their creative world and I would like to thank the artists for welcoming Gabriella and I into their spaces. If you would like to know more about the work of Soledad Sevilla, Paula Valdeón Lemus, Cristina Gamón or Clara Cebrián, do please get in touch.
For more behind the scenes footage of our studio tours, be sure to follow us on Instagram where we will be sharing more in-depth content of our most recent visit to Madrid this week!