Marisa González, multimedia artist, feminist and pioneer in the use of technology in art, was awarded this Tuesday with the Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts 2023, awarded by the Ministry of Culture. The award is worth 100,000.
González, who has just turned 80, is the author of a combative and not at all complacent work that has not yet been recognized with a major retrospective. The jury highlighted “her extensive career as a multimedia artist, pioneer in the use of new technologies from the 70s to the present”, especially valuing the variety of themes she has addressed, such as “feminism, memory and industrial archaeology, recycling and ecology , and attention to the processes of exclusion and precariousness”.
The award jury, considered the Cervantes of the plastic arts, has also highlighted his tireless search for archives, documents and industrial archaeology, always committed to “social inequalities and ecological threats in our globalized world.”
Marisa González (Bilbao, 1943) studied Higher Piano Studies at the Bilbao Conservatory, has a degree in Fine Arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Complutense University of Madrid (1971), a Master’s degree at the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Generative Systems (1973) and BFA at the Corcoran School of Art, Washington D.C. (1976).
His entire artistic career is marked by the relationship with the continually changing technologies of contemporary society. From his first work with photocopiers in the early 70s, later with faxes and then with computers and video. The symbiosis between art and technology, and having as a method the assembly of different techniques, has led her to generate a new language codified by herself.
He has held more than 60 individual exhibitions and 150 group exhibitions, such as at the Venice Biennale, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Tabacalera (Madrid), or the Center de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), where in 2019 he participated in the exhibition FEMINISM!
