Lola Boss (born Valencia 1922, died Thalwil, Switzerland 2012) is an artist long overlooked in art history. Her work took on a notably restrained appearance during the 1960s. Aguilera Cerni and the generous support of Juan Antonio AguirrAnd, along with professors Pascual Patuel and Paula Barreiro, and researcher Clara Solbes Borja, engaged with the painter from the academic world in collaborative and contextual explorations in recent years. A new exhibition at the José de la Mano gallery in Madrid, curated by Isabel Tejeda, marks the first sustained effort to examine and interpret Boss’s events. This project uncovers a significant portion of her unpublished legacy after a chance encounter in Valencia, revealing a hidden chapter in her career.
Beyond the exhibition, this inaugural Tejeda publication highlights Boss as a pioneering figure in Minimal painting and in what was called Ambient Art at the time, a precursor to environmental art in the country. Numerous works have been dated and examined, with several pieces presented in the current show that relate directly to the Spanish-Swiss artist’s exhibition space. The Edurne gallery in Madrid hosted a related display in 1967.
Orbit
Boss studied at Lola Bosshard St. Charles in Valencia after World War II, between 1939 and 1943. From 1948 to 1951 she earned a parallel Fine Arts diploma at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich, the city’s renowned school for applied arts founded in 1878 and then led by Johannes Itten (1938–1954). Yaacov Agam also trained there, and a later meeting in Paris in 1952 was anticipated. Referring to her Swiss studies, Boss recalled in 1973 that the school opened her to color, explaining that color should be expressionistic and that is where she learned that idea. After Zurich she moved to Paris. There, students of the capital’s art centers crossed paths with André Lhote and Fernand Léger, and many artists such as Nancy Spero, Leonilda González, and Bengt Lindström passed through Léger’s academy. She also studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, attending the Atelier d’Art Abstrait.
She returned to Valencia in the early 1960s and joined several collectives. In 1961 she participated in an Ateneo-organized show and added a personal exhibition to it. In Martínez-Medina (1962), a key venue of the era, she would later participate in IV and V March Hall (1963 and 1964) and show at Sala Mateu (1964) and the Radio Valencia room (1964). During these years Boss pursued gestural informalism, aligning with Spanish artists connected to El Paso, including Rafael Canogar and Juana Francés, who employed collage techniques.
Geometric abstraction began to permeate her work by 1966, accompanied by a shift in palette and language toward the end of the decade. In February 1967 she presented a bold exhibition at the Edurne gallery in Madrid, curating a series of large paintings she described as very avant-garde and later as ambient. The works were monochrome with color fields that created visual and environmental dialogue across the two gallery rooms. This show is often cited as the first environmentally focused painting exhibition in Spain.
Boss experimented with simple, minimal color bands and reductive fields. It is likely she began painting colored stripes around 1965, possibly after visiting the Biennale and again after revisiting the 1966 Italian event. Some paintings reveal layered planes across fabric surfaces, sometimes governed by horizontality, sometimes by verticality. She also painted monochrome fabrics and later admitted in a press interview that from those Minimal pieces she dared to work white on white, a direction that he found unsatisfying.
What do you see
The composition is a study in color planes that distribute the pictorial surface within a quiet, even surface. Influences point to Malevich’s zero-degree painting (1918) and Rodchenko’s monochromes of 1921. Her ties to Minimal art are apparent in statements like, in 1967, some canvases two meters high, some monochrome, because the literature in painting made her want to challenge norms.
In October of the same year Boss was invited to join the exhibition Objective Art at the Exhibition Hall of the General Directorate of Fine Arts, curated by Angel Crespo. She was also asked to participate in the second Nueva Generación exhibition in 1967, curated by Aguirre.
From the mid-1970s she largely ceased public cultural activity. This shift coincided with her mother’s long illness. Boss closed her studio, moved into her parents’ home, and reduced her social life. After her mother’s death around 1985, she relocated permanently to Switzerland, where she continued to exhibit regularly.
* A homage exhibition at Edurne Gallery [Margarita de Lucas y Antonio Navascués]