LoLó Soldevilla: Parisian Collages from 1953 to 1970

Loló Soldevilla: Parisian Collages from 1953 to 1970 brings together a group of forty-eight collages produced by Loló Soldevilla. The artworks were created in Paris, while she was living there from 1949 to 1956, or sent by her to friends and gallerists, between 1957 and 1970. The works presented in the exhibition cover practically the entire creative period of her life as a visual artist, until her sudden death in 1971. All these aspects are explored in depth in the essay published in the catalog accompanying the exhibition. Written by Rafael DiazCasas, the text contextualizes the work historically and gives clues for a broader understanding of Loló’s collage-making. In 1957 Loló discussed collages in a statement: “Collages...have been a task of remote times – Japanese painters...used them as a testimony of joy, making them as a pictorial game; contemporaries make them to ‘judge’ a priori the work they are going to realize later. But a well-structured ‘collage’...is reserved in this century [to] elevate a minor art, granting it similar rights to any other artistic technique...A carefully chosen element...can acquire plastic sense if we infiltrate it with the aesthetic values that shape in the whole a supreme idea.” The catalog also contains important information about Loló Soldevilla’s life and includes unpublished archival documents and illustrations. 

Dolores Soldevilla Nieto (1901-1971), known as Loló, was born in Pinar del Rio, Cuba. Her family moved to Havana in 1912. From a young age Loló studied singing, violin, and piano, encouraged by her mother, a piano teacher. This musical training would later have a decisive influence on her artistic work. In 1948 she was appointed Cultural Attaché of the Republic of Cuba in Europe due to her involvement in the island nation’s cultural life. She settled in Paris in 1949 with the mission of promoting art from Cuba. The vibrancy of Paris in the post-war period attracted many international artists, who established themselves there. Soon after, encouraged by Wifredo Lam, whom Loló had met in Havana in 1944, she enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and attended the ateliers of Ossip Zadkine and Leopold Kretz, beginning her career as a visual artist in 1950. While living in Paris, Loló encountered and exhibited with a number of prominent European and South American artists. Simultaneously, she organized several exhibitions such as the 1951 Art Cubain Contemporain, presented at the recently inaugurated Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. Returning to Cuba in 1956, she played a key role as a link between the European avant-garde and the new representatives of abstraction in Latin America. 

Rafael DiazCasas is a New York-based independent curator, art critic, and art consultant born in Havana, Cuba. Interested in modern and contemporary art, he focuses on Latin American and Cuban- born artists. Since 2004, he has been researching and writing about abstraction in Cuba in the second half of the twentieth century, focusing on the development of geometric abstraction in the island since the late 1930s. DiazCasas has served as a lecturer with diverse educational institutions and private collections, including the School of Visual Arts, New York; the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies; the City University of New York; and the David Rockefeller Collection, New York. In 2021, he served as juror for the CINTAS Foundation Fellowship. He has contributed to numerous art magazines, journals, catalogues, and books in the United States, Latin America, and Europe.