PREMIO APERTURA 2021

The Premio Apertura prize – awarded by the Region of Madrid – aims to recognise the quality of one or more artists who participate in the annual editions of APERTURA. This award encompasses different disciplines that make up the visual arts and artists of age using any artistic technique can enter.

This €15,000 prize is part of the Regional Government’s support for artistic creation, visual arts and the art market. Supporting art galleries also stimulates the creation of the artists taking part with their projects, who attempt to make modern art more visible and consolidate Madrid’s art programme. Created as an acquisition prize, the winning pieces will go on to form part of the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo Collection. 

The award is aimed at the galleries that make up Arte Madrid; the Region of Madrid’s art gallery association that organises Apertura. Every September, the galleries celebrate the start of the art season with the joint inauguration of their exhibitions and an extensive programme of activities that attracts collectors, experts and curators from all over the world.

The 2021 Premio Apertura Comunidad de Madrid was awarded to Portuguese artist Gonçalo Sena for his piece To Intrude on Nature’s Way, from the Heinrich Ehrhardt Gallery.

PREMIO APERTURA 2021: TO INTRUDE ON NATURE’S WAY BY GONÇALO SENA

His work stands out for its originality, for its tangible character and for the research that goes into the recovery of materials taken from natural contexts as if it were a kind of modern archaeology; materials such as marble, a material traditionally used in the world of sculpture. The artist’s work also alludes to the restrictions placed on nature, monumentalising a branch of a tree that broke due to Storm Filomena and the snow it brought. He breathes new life into it by returning it to the cycle of nature, turning it into a new element, a fountain, thus combining the poetic aspect of water and a condensing of its sound.

Gonçalo Sena (Cascais, 1984), currently lives in Berlin. He has participated in artist’s residencies at Le Pavillon, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, XX CSAV – Artists Research Laboratory with Tacita Dean at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como (Italy) and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine (USA), to name a few. He has also had several solo exhibitions and some of his pieces are in different public and private collections, such as at Lisbon’s MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology), at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), at Funchal’s Madeira Corporate Services and at Madrid’s Meana-Larrucea collection, among others.