Madrid, April 15, 2024.- Francisco Martín celebrated World Art Day with a visit to the Thyssen Bornemizsa Museum, where the work of the artist Isabel Quintanilla (1938-2017), one of the fundamental figures of contemporary realism, is exhibited.
During his visit, the government delegate was accompanied by the director of the Government’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Manuela Villa, the managing director of the Thyssen Museum, Evelio Acevedo and the artistic director of the Museum, Guillermo Solana.
Together with these personalities, the government delegate has toured an exhibition that brings together a hundred works from Quintanilla’s entire career, including his most outstanding paintings and drawings, many of them pieces never seen in Spain because they were mainly found in museums and collections in Germany, a country in which he had an outstanding recognition in the 1970s and 1980s.
This is the first time that the museum has dedicated a monographic exhibition to a Spanish artist.
Isabel Quintanilla
Quintanilla lived and worked at a time in the history of Spain when women artists did not have the weight or prominence enjoyed by male artists.
His father was retaliated for fighting with the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. She died in the concentration camp of Valdenoceda (Burgos) when Isabel was only three years old.
The painting of Isabel Quintanilla is the result of a resounding mastery of technique and a profession acquired in different schools, but, above all, of a continuous work over time. His paintings have as protagonists objects and scenes of everyday life. A universe in which the visitor recognizes environments and objects that activate their emotions, an objective that was always present in the author. As she herself stated on numerous occasions, painting was her life and her life was painting.
The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum
It is the public institution that contains one of the most important pictorial collections in the world with more than 800 works of art collected over seven decades by the Thyssen-Bornemisza family.
The Museum is managed by the Thyssen-Bornemisza F.S.P. Collection Foundation, Public non-profit foundation, whose purpose is the conservation, study, exhibition and dissemination of the collection.
The Spanish State acquired ownership of the Collection in 1993, thus giving rise to the so-called Triangle of Art on the Paseo del Prado, a museum area in Madrid that concentrates the most important pictorial collection in Spain and one of the most important in the world.