The Moving Work of Spanish Painter Isabel Quintanilla Gets a Spotlight in Madrid

The painter was part of the Madrid realists, a circle of friends—or, in some cases, family members—and artists that also included María Moreno (1933-2020), the brothers Julio (1930-2018) and Francisco López Hernández (1932-2017), Esperanza Parada (1928-2011), Amalia Avia (1930-2011), and probably the most well-known of them all, Antonio López (1936). Although they were not driven by a deliberate desire to form a creative group, they did share a very specific pictorial genre (realism), a historical moment (the second half of the 20th century), and a city (Madrid), circumstances that organically led them to create a community from which they all benefited. However, in the case of Quintanilla, far from resorting to the epic, large-format landscapes filled with details favored by her peers, she focused from the beginning of her career on the intimate and the domestic—things within reach—whether a pair of gloves, plants, nail polish, or the aforementioned Duralex glasses. Hers were objects as humble as they were universal, as simple as they were narrative. “At all times, she has to paint things that evoke an emotion, [things] with which she has some connection because they are everyday objects. She does not look beyond, she looks around the house… And they are all objects that her son still keeps, even today. In the small and the simple is where she finds the emotion and the invitation to paint,” explains Leticia de Cos Martín, the curator of the exhibition.

There are also some spaces, equally personal and prosaic—a courtyard, or a room in her own house—that, although always empty in Quintanilla’s paintings, contain clues about the people who inhabit them, such as a baby hammock (belonging to her son Francesco), painting utensils (belonging to her or her husband, the sculptor Francisco López Hernández), or a sewing machine (a reference to her mother, who worked as a dressmaker to support Isabel and her sister after their father’s death during the Spanish Civil War). “There are statements from her in which she said that she wasn’t of interest to the [art] authorities because she was painting those Duralex glasses, and that wasn’t exportable; it wasn’t a Dutch still life with Bohemian crystal and fine porcelain,” de Cos Martín says. It’s an anecdote that speaks volumes about the artist’s freedom, and the strong conviction that drove her to paint the small and (apparently) inconsequential, despite the work’s limited popularity at the time.