The Argentine artist Elda Cerrato has won the Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts 2022 with which the Ministry of Culture recognizes the artistic career of an Ibero-American artist in the field of plastic arts.
With this award, endowed with 100,000 euros, his “wide and sustained experimental artistic work, until recently little recognized” is recognized.
“Apparently unconnected territories intersect in his work: spiritual searches, esoteric inquiries, radical politicization, anticipatory capacity of art, and a special call for attention to the fragility of democratic institutions in Latin America,” says the award jury’s decision, made public today in Madrid.
In addition, the jury emphasizes that the artist “speaks of memory on the edges, to account for a trajectory that is illuminated from the margins of hegemonic artistic movements, institutions and trends.”
Cerrato (Asti, Italy, 1930) is a visual artist, teacher and researcher who lives and works in Buenos Aires. Personal and collective memory has always been present in her work, developed through searches for esoteric, political territories or reflection on absence and presence, according to biographical data highlighted by the Ministry.
Together with his partner, the experimental musician Luis Zubillaga, since the 1950s he joined the first groups of the mystic master Gurdjeff in Latin America and other alternative spiritual and philosophical searches.
In the sixties she was very close to Aldo Pellegrini, Juan Carlos Paz, Oscar Masotta, linked to the Di Tella Institute and later to the CAYC.
He was part, together with Juan Carlos Romero, of the foundation of the SUAP (Single Union of Plastic Artists). He lived in Venezuela in the sixties and during the last Argentine military dictatorship. There she was actively integrated into the cultural environment of Caracas and, in particular, into the group El Techo de la Ballena.
After the dictatorship, his work draws attention to the threats that hang over democratic life, in the continuous context of economic, political and social crisis that Argentina is experiencing, details his biographical profile.
In 2015, the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires, where she taught, published “Memory on the Edges”, which brings together her archives, along with texts by different authors and researchers.
In 2021, the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires organized an anthological exhibition of his work under the title “The wonderful day of the peoples”. Currently, he works together with his son Luciano Zubillaga, in the audiovisual project “Family Reunion”.
The jury was made up of the artist Tania Bruguera Fernández, winner of the 2021 Velázquez Prize; the artist, curator and university professor Isidro López-Aparicio; the writer and art critic Juan Manuel Bonet; the artistic director of Tenerife Espacio de las Artes Gilberto González González; the researcher and president of the IAC Marta Pérez Ibáñez, and the professor of history of contemporary art Paula Barreiro López, among other experts.
