ARCO PRIZE

COMMUNITY OF MADRID 2024 ARCO AWARD

MIGUEL MARINA (Madrid, 1989).

In his practice, he uses processes that entail the merger of the concepts of idea, image and material. The work Untitled (2024) seeks to analyse and think about the landscape and the different elements comprising it from painting and the different artistic avenues that it offers. It is a fragmented narration that evokes the manual as a starting point when interacting with his work on a daily basis.

FUENTESAL ARENILLAS

Made up of Julia Fuentesal (Huelva, 1986) and Pablo M. Arenillas (Cádiz, 1989), this duo is known for their unmistakable legacy of Andalusian sculpture. La Danza Mudanza I and II (2023) is Fuentesal Arenillas’s award-winning installation. In their artistic practice, these artists explore the playful dimension as a production of signs, in which autobiographical aspects intersect with formal resources like the double figure and repetition, while including chance as an essential component.

OTHER AWARD-WINNING WORKS

2023 ARCO AWARD

SAHATSA JAUREGI (Salvador de Bahía, Brazil, 1984). Masks, 2023 and Jone, 2023.

Her work navigates the symbolism of objects that live with us and construct our identity, paying attention to the humanity that we imbue in them. From this point of departure, she builds sensual taxonomies that question our way of creating collective imaginaries and building identities, letting the souls of these objects rise up in insubordination against what they are assumed to be.

One prominent feature of her oeuvre is the Aizkora series, which the Community of Madrid has awarded. In it, Jauregi works with her uncle, an artisan specialised in making competition axes. Through sculptures brimming with sensuality, she fully enters a symbolic space that is a hallmark of the Basque Country, a place where the axe has many meanings that have little to do with desire.

EVA FÀBREGAS (Barcelona, 1988). Growths, 2023.

This artist explores the erotica of consumer goods and the mechanisms of engineering desire through sculpture, video, installation and sound. Her interest in affects has led her to produce works that examine the culture of wellbeing and relaxation, psychodrama and the marketing industry, as well as therapeutic subcultures in the social media.

Growths, which is part of a series by the same name, is a series of sensual biomorphic sculptures created with latex, resin and synthetic fabrics, which might be an allusion to motherhood, although the artist leaves all interpretations open.

2022 ARCO AWARD

CRISTINA MEJÍAS (Jerez de la Frontera, 1986) Knot the Tongue, Grasp a Stream II, 2021.

Cristina Mejías is an artist whose work revolves around time, narration and language as a set of symbols and signs that comprise a system. Her most recent projects produce video installations that occupy and transform a space, and this use of video enables her to create a story that unfolds in a time during which a change, a rhythm, a story occurs. Rodríguez gallery (Poznań, Poland).[MOU1] 

SOL CALERO (Caracas, 1982) Mesa servida, 2022 and Silla Isadora, 2019.

Sol Calero is an artist whose work takes on the guise of immersive, large-scale installations in bright colours that explore themes of representation, identity, displacement and marginalisation, all transformed by her own perspective as a migrant. The artist’s work is fuelled by visual clichés related to the popular image of Latin America. ChertLüdde gallery (Berlin, Germany).

EDISON PEÑAFIEL (Guayaquil, 1985) Mare Magnvm-Navis I, 2022.

Edison Peñafiel is an Ecuadoran artist who emigrated to the United States to escape his country’s political and economic instability. His unique style integrates video and multimedia installations to create surrealistic echoes of our world, atmospheres that translate experience. The subject of his work revolves around migrants, informed by his own life. By introducing looped video projections, Peñafiel mimics the loops that shape our history and our present. Sabrina Amrani gallery (Madrid).

2021 ARCO AWARD 

PABLO CAPITÁN DEL RÍO (Granada, 1982) LA FUGA EBRIA, 2021.

His inquiry into matter in his sculptural practice is based on obsessive work in which the process and tactile experience become the essential features. Art Nueve gallery (Murcia).

KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED (California, 1985) MATHEMATICS CASUAL, 2021.

She is an interdisciplinary artist interested in intertextuality, literacy, archives and ecology. Her installations work as a radical method of self-publishing where words interact with the architecture, exploring an experimental poetics of Blackness, the vernacular language and non-linearity as radical forms and ways of thinking about the history of the Black community regarding ways of learning/unlearning. NOME Gallery (Berlin, Germany).

2020 ARCO AWARD 

José Díaz (Madrid, 1981)
Memory Foam, 2020

Nora Aurrekoetxea (Bilbao, 1989)
Milena and aulki bat, 2019

Osías Yanov (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1980)
Pieza perteneciente a la serie escaleras

VIDEO BY NORA AURREKOETXEA, JOSÉ DÍAZ AND OSÍAS YANOV IN CONVERSATION WITH MANUEL SEGADE

SEE WINNING WORKS FROM PREVIOUS YEARS  HERE