Irene Infantes for her piece Untitled, from the Alarcón Criado gallery, and Mercedes Pimiento, for her work Untitled, from the Isabel Hurley gallery, have been awarded the Comunidad de Madrid 2023 Estampa Prize.
This is the Region’s way of recognising the significance of the Estampa Contemporary Art Fair and affirming the regional government’s support for contemporary creativity in all its forms, as well as supporting galleries and programmes that aim to spread and promote contemporary art. This acquisition award helps build the region’s collections at the CA2M by adding important new voices.
2023 ESTAMPA PRIZE IRENE INFANTES AND MERCEDES PIMIENTO
IRENE INFANTES
Irene Infantes (Seville, 1989) works mainly with textiles and, in particular, with wool and how it has been used throughout history. Of her solo exhibitions the ones held at the Galería Alarcón Criado in 2021 and at García Galería in 2019 are particularly noteworthy. Her work is part of collections in places such as the Andalusian Centre for Contemporary Art, the MKG Museum in Hamburg and the University of the Arts in London. Her piece Untitled, 2023, is a textile piece in the form of a large hieroglyphic with which she evokes both Andalusian textiles and the cosmology of the Nasa, an indigenous people of the Andean region of Colombia, for whom learning to weave is a fundamental part of the growth and development of women's way of thinking. This piece includes small bags reminiscent of jigras (traditional net bags), which indigenous women offer to their children and husbands as a symbol of the weaving of life, evolution and thought.
MERCEDES PIMIENTO
The work of Mercedes Pimiento (Seville, 1990) focuses on investigating the way in which human beings relate to the spaces they inhabit, with particular attention paid to the processes of construction and manufacture through which human beings define their environment. She has had solo exhibitions at the Galería Nogueras-Blanchard in Barcelona in 2023 and at the Fundación Arranz-Bravo, in Hospitalet de Llobregat (Barcelona), among others. She has also taken part in Generación 2023, at La Casa Encendida and the Fundación Montemadrid. Her piece Untitled, 2023, made with beeswax, silicone and steel, belongs to the series Superficie neutra (Neutral Surface) and is a formal essay on the encounter between the body, architecture and the substances that flow between them. The result is a system of modular objects whose size and morphology evoke both construction elements and objects of the domestic space (bed, bathtub or washbasin), which interact with the body.
Estampa Prize 2022
Irene de Andrés (Ibiza, 1986)
Victoria Encinas (1962)
Estampa Prize 2021
Ixone Sádaba (Bilbao, 1977)
SEE WINNING WORKS FROM PREVIOUS YEARS HERE