De Cos MartÃn, Leticia / Escritor
Exhibition at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza from February 27 to June 2, 2024. Up until now Isabel Quintanilla had not received the recognition she deserved as a prominent name on the Spanish art scene of the second half of the 1900s. Beginning in the 1970s, her works were frequently shown in various German cities and acquired by museums and collectors in that country, a fact that prevented her from being better known in Spain. Indeed, half of the pieces on view here, and reproduced in this catalog, have been brought from Germany. Leticia de Cos has charted the course of Quintanilla s career and life through the genres and subjects she explored. The artist s still lifes combine classical arrangements with contemporary objects, such as a Duralex glass, a telephone or a sewing machine (her mother s means of providing for her family), which recall a particular period of Spain s past. Quintanilla painted experienced reality and much of her oeuvre depicts the spaces she lived in: the bedroom, the kitchen, the bathroom, the sewing corner and the artist s studio. Although these interiors are nearly always devoid of figures, the people in her life – her husband and her son – are latently present in them. Everything exudes intimacy: the windows through which light enters from the outside and the doors that take us further inside.
