Dolores Soldevilla Nieto, known as ‘Loló Soldevilla’, became involved in the visual arts in the late 1940s, following her work as a musician, educator, and social and political activist. In 1949, she was appointed as cultural attaché for the Cuban embassy in France. Soon after this, she moved to Paris, where she enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1951, she joined the Atelier d’Art Abstrait founded by painters Jean Dewasne (1921–1999) and Edgard Pillet (1912–1996). During this period, L. Soldevilla immersed herself in the artistic and intellectual milieu of postwar Paris and travelled extensively. Her exchanges and collaborations with avant-garde European and Latin American artists such as Victor Vasarely (1906–1997), Jean Arp (1886–1966) and Jesús Rafael Soto (1923–2005) steered her artistic practice toward geometric abstraction and a visual language based in the principles of universality, purity and formal simplicity associated with Concrete art.

Throughout the 1950s L. Soldevilla participated in solo and group exhibitions in Europe, Cuba, and Venezuela. She worked in multiple mediums – including in painting, sculpture, collage and relief constructions – exploring geometric form, colour and movement. L. Soldevilla’s investigations into light culminated in the relieves luminosos she created in 1955 with Eusebio Sempere (1923–1985). These ‘light reliefs’ demonstrate her keen interest in experimentation and formal innovation, while her mobiles were among the first examples of kinetic sculpture in mid-1950s Cuba. As exemplified by Sin título [Untitled, ca. 1957] from the series Cartas celestiales [Celestial Letters], the circle is a common motif in her work. Abstract compositional arrangements such as this one also evoke her passion for music and her fascination with astrology and the cosmos.

After eight years abroad, L. Soldevilla returned permanently to Havana in 1956. In the following year, she and artist Pedro de Oraá (1931–2020) founded the Galería de Arte Color Luz (1957–61). Although short-lived, this experimental art space was a centre for the development and legitimation of geometric abstraction in Cuba and a hub for the group of artists known as Los Diez Pintores Concretos [The Ten Concrete Painters, 1958–61].

As abstraction became increasingly silenced in the aftermath of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, L. Soldevilla alternated her engagement in the visual arts with other creative pursuits, including writing and journalism. In 1962, she worked as a toy designer for Cuba’s National Institute of Tourism. She also taught at the University of Havana School of Architecture until 1964. In the same year, L. Soldevilla founded Espacio (1964–72), a multidisciplinary artist collective whose sense of community and collaboration echoed that of the Galería de Arte Color Luz.

After decades of relative obscurity, L. Soldevilla’s work was the subject of the 2019 exhibition Constructing Her Universe at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York. This retrospective illuminated the breadth of Soldevilla’s artistic career. Since then, the legacy of this visionary artist has received increased critical attention, attesting not only to the crucial role she played in the development of Concrete art in Cuba, but also to her contribution to the transnational history of abstraction in the mid-20th-century.