In the late 1960s, Soledad Sevilla focused initially on geometric abstraction as a reaction to the predominance of Informalism and Abstract Expressionism at that time, as well as the academicism of the Fine Arts schools. Between 1969 and 1971, she attended the seminar on Automatic Generation of Plastic Forms, led by the mathematician Ernesto García at the Universidad de Madrid. Here, so-called ‘normative art’ was promoted, based on serial forms, chromatic purity and the absence of subjectivity. Sevilla went on to produce geometric paintings that explored the infinite variations of the grid, the module and the weave. In the works of that period, the pictorial space is constructed as a geometric search limited to the line, the right angle, the three primary colours (red, yellow and blue) and the three non-colours (black, white and grey). These paintings had a serial character based on optical, perceptual and structural proposals.

In the early 1970s, her geometric work drifted toward a more lyrical abstraction that allowed the emotional element to emerge. Without abandoning her interwoven structures, she freed the space of elements in favour of a more poetic quality, suppressing parts of the reticular figures and pursuing the development of linear elements. A process of simplification and emptying is accentuated in the late eighties, with markedly minimal paintings in which diagonal lines emerge from the canvas evoking other worlds. As the artist put it in the title of an exhibition reviewing her career from the 1960s to the 1980s, her work can be understood as ‘variations on a line’.