The Argentine artist Elda Cerrato (92 years old, Asti, Italy) has received this Friday the Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts for 2022. This award is endowed with 100,000 euros and is awarded each year to an Ibero-American artist.
The jury has highlighted Cerrato “for a broad and sustained experimental artistic work, until recently little recognized.
Apparently unconnected territories intersect in her work: spiritual quests, esoteric inquiries, radical politicization, anticipatory capacity of art, and a special call for attention to the fragility of democratic institutions in Latin America”.
She has also pointed out that she "speaks of memory on the edges to account for a trajectory that is illuminated from the margins of hegemonic artistic movements, institutions and trends."
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Born in Italy in 1930, Cerrato is a visual artist, teacher, and researcher who lives and works in Buenos Aires.
In her work, the theme of personal and collective memory has always been present, developed through searches for esoteric, political territories or reflection on absence and presence.
Together with his partner, the experimental musician Luis Zubillaga, he joined the first groups of the mystical teacher Gurdjieff in Latin America since the 1950s and initiated other alternative spiritual and philosophical searches.
In the sixties she was very close to the psychoanalyst Oscar Masotta, she was linked to the cultural research center Instituto Di Tella and later to the CAYC (Center for Art and Communication of Buenos Aires).
She was part, along with Juan Carlos Romero, of the foundation of the SUAP (Single Union of Plastic Artists).
She lived in Venezuela in that decade and during the Argentine military dictatorship of Videla.
There she was actively integrated into the cultural environment of Caracas and, in particular, into the group El Techo de la Ballena.
'Memory album I. The reflection of the moon on the water' (1998), by Elda Cerrato.
After the dictatorship, his work focused on denouncing the threats that hang over democratic life, in the continuous context of economic, political and social crisis that Argentina is experiencing.
In 2015, the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires, where she taught, published
Memory on the Edges
, which brings together her archives, along with texts by different authors and researchers.
In 2021, the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires organized an anthological exhibition of his work under the title
The Wonderful Day of the Peoples
, in which Cerrato goes through a personal, political and social search.
In an interview for the
magazine Ñ
, the artist stated in 2021: "I find it difficult to differentiate my life from my painting because through it I find myself and myself, with others."
She now works together with her son Luciano Zubillaga, in the audiovisual project
Family Reunion
.
Cerrato is the fourth woman in a row to win the award, and the eighth since it was first given in 2002. Last year it was won by Cuban exiled artist Tania Bruguera, in 2020 by Valencian Soledad Sevilla, and in 2019 by Chilean Cecilia Vicuña.