Apertura Prize

This €15,000 prize is part of the Regional Government’s support for artistic creation, the visual arts and the art market. By supporting art galleries artists are encouraged to create and participate in these projects, thus contributing to making contemporary art more visible and enhance Madrid's art system. As it is an acquisition prize, the winning works will become part of the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo’s collection. 

The award is directed at the galleries that make up Arte Madrid, an association of art galleries in the Region of Madrid that organises Apertura. Every year in September, the galleries celebrate the start of the art season with the joint opening of their exhibitions and an extensive programme of activities that attract collectors, experts and curators from all over the world.

2024 APERTURA AWARD: SUZANNE TREISTER

Treister was given this award for her piece Alchemy/Le Figaro 16 January 2008 displayed at The Ryder gallery. She was born in London in 1958 and earned initial recognition as a painter in the 1980s. However, in the 1990s she became a pioneer in the digital/new media/website fields, creating works on emerging technologies and developing fictitious world and international collaborative organisations. She uses a variety of media, including video, Internet, interactive technologies, photography, drawing and watercolour.

Suzanne Treister is a British artist who is a pioneer in the field of digital art and new media with a more than thirty-year career under her belt. She uses fiction in her work to create alternative worlds through a series of individual projects that tend to take several years of work. She uses formats like interactive software, drawing, painting and watercolour to analyse forms of alternative beliefs, control and surveillance mechanisms and the connection between the new technologies and society.

The award-winning work, Alchemy/Le Figaro 16 January 2008, is part of the Alchemy (2007–2008) series, comprised of drawings and watercolours that transcribe the front pages of international newspapers in the guise of alchemical drawings, recasting the world as a place animated by unknown forces, powers and belief systems.

2023 APERTURA PRIZE: FERNANDA FRAGATEIRO

For her piece As Found 2, exhibited at the Galería Elba Benítez in Madrid. Born in 1962 in Montijo (Portugal). Lives and works in Lisbon (Portugal). Fernanda Fragateiro’s approach to her art involves a broad, varied and expansive exploration of space in its multiple manifestations – private, public, temporal, socially determined, gender-defined – through sculptural works, installations and outdoor interventions.

Although Fragateiro’s work frequently varies in scale and embraces a wide range of materials, it always retains a powerful style of its own that stems from a meticulous, minimalist aesthetic of form, colour and surface texture. But while this extremely precise formalist quality is often angular, the work itself, in its final form, is neither programmatic nor isolated. In fact, it is the opposite, as Fragateiro’s interventions extend beyond the boundaries of the object itself and embrace the phenomenological fullness of space and perceptual experience in which both the object and that object’s viewer exist.

Fragateiro often repurposes existing material that is rich in cultural implications – silk thread from a German factory, second-hand art books and magazines, discarded architectural models or debris from Portugal’s construction boom – in order to mould her complex yet delicate pieces in which an intricate web of internal references to art theory, architectural history, the feminist discourse and political revisionism are woven.

2022 APERTURA PRIZE: IRENE GRAU

For her piece 3mm, exhibited at the Juan Silió gallery in Madrid. Often producing her work in series, it is the result of long and specific research in Nature – done in situ. Sometimes it is coupled with time spent in her studio, experimenting with different materials and techniques. She then finishes her pieces in the exhibition space, where it is again transferred and transformed to create an entity within the specificity of said space. 

The jury highlighted the way in which this artist approaches the construction of landscape through painting. In this case, via her paintings made with granite and marble, which reflect the complicity and the power of transformation that a single element can contain. Grau is one of the artists who has most reflected on nature, landscape, process and formalising these ideas through painting.

Irene Grau (Valencia, 1986) holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the Universitat Politècnica de València. All her work focuses on painting and landscape, process and displacement. She painstakingly researches the possibilities of monochrome painting and how it relates to landscape painting as a genre and as a framework, but above all as experimentation, as a way of seeing while walking.  All this is interwoven in the traditions of radical monochrome painting, mural painting, performative processes and conceptual art.

2021 APERTURA PRIZE: GONÇALO SENA

For his piece To Intrude on Nature’s Way, from the Heinrich Ehrhardt Gallery. His work is noteworthy for its originality, its material nature and the research he does into recovering materials extracted from natural contexts as a kind of contemporary archaeology. He uses materials such as marble, which is traditional in the world of sculpture. In addition, the artist’s work alludes to the restitution of nature. He has done this by monumentalising a tree branch broken during storm Filomena, giving it new life by returning it to the cycle of nature where it is transformed into a new element, a fountain, in which the artist has brought together the poetics of water and the condensation of sound.

Gonçalo Sena (Cascais, 1984) currently lives in Berlin. He has participated in artistic residencies such as: Le Pavillon, Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France); XX CSAV - Artists Research Laboratory, with Tacita Dean, Fondazione Antonio Ratti (Como, Italy); and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine (USA), among others. He has had several solo exhibitions, and his work is on show in various public and private collections such as: MAAT Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia in Lisbon; MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge; Madeira Corporate Services in Funchal; and the Meana-Larrucea collection in Madrid, among others.