Isabel Quintanilla's Intimate Realism
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
27 February - 2 June 2024
For the first time, the museum is devoting a retrospective to a Spanish woman artist, Isabel Quintanilla (1938-2017), one of the key figures of contemporary realism. The exhibition features 90 works spanning the artist’s entire career and including her most important paintings and drawings. Many have never previously been seen in Spain as they are principally housed in museums and collections in Germany, a country where she was very successful and widely recognised in the 1970s and 1980s.
Isabel Quintanilla lived and worked at a time in Spain when women artists lacked the status and recognition accorded to their male counterparts, an issue that she herself confronted in her public statements with the aim of defending the significance of her work and that of her female colleagues.
The exhibition presents a survey of the artist’s universe, filled with her personal possessions and with the intimacy of her different houses and studios. At the same time, these everyday settings and objects are part of the collective imagination and as such appeal directly to viewers’ emotions, which was one of the artist’s enduring aims.
Isabel Quintanilla’s painting is the result of an absolute mastery of technique and of skill acquired at different art schools, but above all of a continuous working process. She always referred to the constant struggle involved in resolving the problems posed by painting to all artists who wish to make use of it in order to experience reality in a different way.
The selection of works on display spans the six decades of Isabel Quintanilla’s career; from The Table Lamp (1956), the earliest surviving work by the artist, to Still Life with Sienna Background (2017), the last that she delivered to her gallerist shortly before her death.
They are presented in the form of six thematic and chronological sections that move from still lifes to interiors, landscapes and gardens.
Isabel Quintanilla was one of a group of artists who lived and worked in Madrid from the mid-1950s and who were connected by both family ties and friendship. Known as the Madrid Realists, members of the group included Antonio López (born 1936), María Moreno (1933-2020), the brothers Julio (1930-1918) and Francisco López Hernández (1932-2017), Esperanza Parada (1928-2011) and Amalia Avia (1930-2011).
Like those artists, Isabel Quintanilla was familiar with the avant-gardes but she soon opted for the realism of the Spanish tradition, with which she closely identified. She painted her own surroundings: whether a still life, a domestic interior or a courtyard, the subjects of these works are her personal possessions, the rooms in her houses, and the trees and plants in her courtyard. Isabel Quintanilla was interested in everyday motifs and the ones she had closest to hand, such as the drinking glass which is the subject of dozens of her works. In some cases her paintings and drawings reveal tributes to her mother, a dressmaker, and her husband, a sculptor, in the form of a sewing machine, sewing scissors, a mould or a bag of plaster.
Isabel Quintanilla was born in Madrid on 22 July 1938. During the Civil War her father fought on the Republican side and died in 1941 in a concentration camp in Burgos. Her mother was thus obliged to work as a dressmaker to support her two daughters.
Aged eleven, Isabel Quintanilla started to go to art classes in private studios, then aged fifteen enrolled at the San Fernando Higher School of Fine Arts in Madrid. There she met Antonio López, Julio and Francisco López and María Moreno, all fellow students in her year. In 1959 she obtained the title of teacher of drawing and painting and started to give classes as an assistant in a senior school. She also exhibited for the first time in a group exhibition organised by the Fundación RodríguezAcosta in Granada.
In 1960 Isabel Quintanilla married Francisco López. They moved to Rome for four years as López had been awarded the Grand Prix for Art from the Academia de San Fernando to study in Italy. They met artists, musicians and creators and travelled around Europe. Isabel Quintanilla also continued her artistic studies and held her first solo exhibition in Caltanissetta (Sicily). After returning to Spain she resumed teaching but also continued to paint and in 1966 was the subject of an exhibition at Galería Edurne in Madrid, showing works principally executed in Rome, almost all of which were sold.
In 1970 Quintanilla met Ernest Wuthenow, a collector and a founding partner of Galería Juana Mordó in Madrid who was also responsible for the promotion of that gallery’s artists abroad.
Together with the gallerists Hans Brockstedt and Herbert Meyer-Ellinger, Quintanilla was able to exhibit her work throughout Germany in the 1970s and 1980s in group exhibitions such as Art after Reality: a new realism in America and in Europe in Hanover (1974) and at Documenta 6 in Kassel (1977). She also held solo shows in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Darmstadt, among other German cities. It was in Germany that the artist sold most of her output.
Isabel Quintanilla also exhibited in Paris, New York, Helsinki, Rotterdam, Munich and Spain, where she participated in the major exhibition held at the Fundación Marcelino Botín in Santander entitled Another Reality: colleagues in Madrid (1992). In addition, her work was presented at the Museo de Belas Artes da Coruña (2005) together with that of Amalia Avia and María Moreno, and in a group show at the Museo del Prado (2007).
In 1996 she was the subject of a retrospective at the Centro Cultural Conde Duque and a solo exhibition at Galería Leandro Navarro, both in Madrid. Twenty years later, in 2016, Isabel Quintanilla’s work was presented at the Museo Nacional ThyssenBornemisza in the group exhibition Madrid Realists. The artist died a year and a half later, aged 79, in October 2017.
Curator: Leticia de Cos Martín
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014, Madrid
