Opera Gallery has announced the global representation of the Spanish painter Xevi Solà. Solà joins Opera bringing with him a compelling voice in figurative painting—one that reimagines psychological portraiture with sensitivity, nuance, and a lightness of touch.
This news follows several exhibitions at Opera Gallery, ‘Xevi Solà’ in Geneva (08-22 March 2024), ‘Social Landscape’ in Miami (9th-26th May 2025) and a showcase in London this October.
Born in 1969 in Santa Coloma de Farners, Spain, and a graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona, Solà lives and works in Girona. His work lies within the intersection of portraiture and introspection. Solà paints from found imagery—fashion shoots, mugshots, Hollywood films—merging and reworking them to create compositions that reveal more than just a likeness but a portrayal of the essence of his subjets.
Solà’s works quickly and intuitively, mindful to let instinct lead, allowing the painting to carry traces of his mistakes, successes, moods, and dreams, as much as any photographic source. His unique and vibrant colour palette and his compositions often isolate figures against minimal or void-like backgrounds, focusing the attention on the human subject, gesture, and silence.
About the artist
Xevi Solà Lives and works in Girona, Spain
Xevi Solà’s paintings balance figuration and abstraction, gesture and control. His practice unfolds through urgency—quick, instinctive brushwork that captures the pulse of looking and the trace of movement. Over time, Solà has stripped away narrative to focus on what painting itself can hold: color, form, rhythm, and the physicality of paint. Figures once caught in stories now appear suspended in silence, their presence both intimate and elusive.
Vibrant, often unexpected palettes heighten the tension between clarity and ambiguity, between appearing and dissolving. Echoes of Lucian Freud, Matisse, early Expressionism, and contemporary voices like Henry Taylor or Chantal Joffe surface in his work, yet Solà filters these influences through his own immediacy—transforming them into a language that feels raw, tender, and unsettling all at once.
Solà studied Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona, where early influences from cinema and photography—from David Lynch to Diane Arbus—sharpened his attention to human expression. He has exhibited internationally with solo shows at Opera Gallery (Geneva), Alzueta Gallery (Barcelona, Madrid), Yiri Arts (Taiwan), and Galeria Inox (Rio de Janeiro), among others. His work has appeared in art fairs including Art Paris, Art Miami, KIAF Seoul, and Art Central Hong Kong, and is held in collections such as the University of Barcelona Art Collection, the Leonel Kaz Collection, and the Eileen S. Kaminsky Family Foundation.
In 2014, he received the Young Art Award at the Taipei Contemporary Art Fair.
