Dolores CAPDEVILA

Dolores Capdevila – Biography and Original Oil Paintings

Dolores Capdevila is an Argentine-born figurative painter, born in 1966, who has lived and worked in Trondheim, Norway, since 2008. Trained at the National University of Córdoba, she spent a decade in Germany and four years on Canada’s west coast before settling in Scandinavia. Her oils on canvas return again and again to the gardens, children and half-remembered afternoons of an Argentine childhood, rendered through a careful play of light and shadow.

Le Coin des Arts holds around ten original oil paintings by the artist, all unique works from 2008 to 2011: Invocation, El Secreto, L’autre côté, Fugace, Illusion Ib and El Bosque (2011), together with La fille et la fenêtre, Tarde verde, La infanta de Coello en el bosque and La fille de las cerises (2008), each chosen for the quality of its paint surface and its condition.

Early life and training in Córdoba

Capdevila grew up in a small Argentine town in a household without television, surrounded by gardens; the fig and chestnut trees of those years still surface in her pictures. She studied visual arts at the National University of Córdoba, graduating in 1990 with a fine arts degree with honours, and has taught drawing and painting to children and adults ever since.

Germany, 1994-2004

In 1994 she moved to Germany. In 1995 she took part in two group exhibitions in Tübingen, one of them devoted to Latin American artists. In 1999 she joined Galerie Peters-Barenbrock, with spaces in Berlin and the Baltic artists’ village of Ahrenshoop, which has shown her work steadily ever since, from its tenth-anniversary exhibition in 2002 to the twenty-fifth in 2017.

Bowen Island, the fairs and Paris (2004-2008)

From 2004 Capdevila lived on Bowen Island, a small artists’ community near Vancouver, exhibiting at The Gallery there (‘Gifted’, 2005; ‘Parallel Worlds’, 2006). That same year she joined Galerie Bongardt in Hanover, and her canvases became regulars at the German fairs, art.fair in Cologne and Art Karlsruhe. In 2007 she joined Le Coin des Arts in Paris, which included her in a group exhibition in 2008.

Trondheim, since 2008

Settled in Trondheim since 2008, she is represented there by Galleri SG, which gave her the solo exhibition ‘The Invisible’ in 2019. In 2015 she returned to Argentina for a solo exhibition at the Cripta Jesuítica in Córdoba. She also teaches figurative drawing and painting at the Arttik workshop in Trondheim.

Her painting: light, shadow and memory

Capdevila is first and foremost a painter. Her figurative oils, often of modest size, people woods, windows and gardens with girls and children; in a 2022 interview she said she often paints her two daughters as they were as children. Her multilingual titles mirror her travels: Tarde verde appears on her own website as Green afternoon, La fille et la fenêtre as Girl at the window. Alongside painting she makes drawings, ‘narrative boxes’ and, more recently, cut-paper figures and collage. To our knowledge she has no catalogued original prints and there is no catalogue raisonné.

In the same interview she described meditating before she paints, insisting that technique matters but the spiritual side matters just as much, and that the wish to play counts for more than talent. During the pandemic she went back to a childhood pastime, cutting figures out of cardboard, and enlarged her grandmother’s poems to work them into collages. Her yellow-painted studio stands in a rhododendron garden at Flakk, outside Trondheim. Not all her canvases are small: Galleri SG has offered a 90 x 90 cm oil, De lyse timene (‘The bright hours’), alongside series with Norwegian titles such as Uovervinnelig sommer.

Collecting Dolores Capdevila: a buyer’s guide

Unique works. Each canvas is one of a kind, so there is no edition or numbering to check; title and date should simply match the work described.

Signature. The artist monograms her canvases: Fugace (2011) bears ‘D.C.’ lower right. See our note on signatures.

Size. Some canvases are small (Fugace measures 25 x 25.5 cm), which makes them easy to hang in a home.

Documentation. The artist’s website groups her work by period: El secreto, L’autre côté, Fugace and Illusion appear under 2010-2011, La infanta de Coello en el bosque and Girl at the window under 2008-2009 – a useful cross-reference for any canvas.

Provenance and certificate. Works offered by the gallery, which has shown the artist since 2007, come with a certificate of authenticity.

Condition and framing. Check canvas tension and look for cracking; a simple frame or tray frame suits these luminous surfaces.

Pitfalls. A digital print after a painting is not an original print. With no documented etchings or lithographs, any ‘print’ attributed to her deserves close scrutiny.

In the UK. Her published CV lists no British exhibitions or collections; for collectors in Britain, her galleries in Paris, Germany and Trondheim remain the places to see her work.

Le Coin des Arts has followed Dolores Capdevila’s painting since 2007. Her dreamlike oils sit well beside Dorothea Tanning, the quiet interiors of Annapia Antonini and the Latin American artists in our stock, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta and Arthur Luiz Piza. Explore also contemporary art and our paintings.

Sources and further reading

Dolores Capdevila – artist’s website, CV · Barnas Katedral i Trondheim – ‘Dolores loves gardens’ (2022) · Galleri SG, Trondheim · galerie.de – Galerie Peters-Barenbrock