The jury of the award, endowed with 100,000 euros, highlights “his extensive and sustained experimental artistic work, until recently little recognized”
Elda Cerrato (Asti, Italy, 1930) has been awarded the Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts, endowed with 100.000 euros. . . . It also entails the celebration of an exhibition at the Queen Sofia. The jury, chaired by Isaac Sastre de Diego, and composed of Tania Bruguera, Isidro Lopez-Aparicio, Juan Manuel Bonet, Gilberto Gonzalez, Marta Perez Ibanez, Maria Angels Lopez, Paula Barreiro and Ana Longoni, has highlighted “its broad and sustained experimental art work, until recently little recognized. Apparently unconnected territories intersect in his work: spiritual quests, esoteric inquiries, radical politicization, anticipatory capacity of art, and a special warning about the fragility of democratic institutions in Latin America». In addition, the jury has pointed out that “Elda Cerrato speaks of memory on the edges to account for a trajectory that is illuminated from the margins of hegemonic artistic movements, institutions and trends.”
Elda Cerrato is a visual artistteacher and researcher who lives and works in Buenos Aires. The theme of personal and collective memory has always been present in his work, developed through searches for esoteric, political territories or reflection on absence and presence. Together with his partner, the experimental musician Luis ZubillagaSince the 1950s, he has been part of the first groups of the mystic teacher Gurdjeff in Latin America and other alternative spiritual and philosophical searches. In the 1960s she was very close to Aldo Pellegrini, Juan Carlos Paz, Oscar Masotta, linked to the Di Tella Institute and later to the CAYC. She was part, along with Juan Carlos Romero, of the foundation of the SUAP (Single Union of Plastic Artists). Lived in Venezuela in the 1960s and during the last Argentine military dictatorship. There she was actively integrated into the cultural environment of Caracas and, in particular, into the group El Techo de la Ballena.
After the dictatorship, his work draws attention to 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 ‘La memoria en losbordes’, which brings together his archives, along with texts by different authors and researchers. In 2021, the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires organized an anthological exhibition of her work under the title ‘The wonderful day of the peoples’. Currently, he works together with his son Luciano Zubillaga, in the audiovisual project ‘Family Reunion’.
Los previous awardees with Velázquez have been: Ramón Gaya, Antonio Tàpies, Pablo Palazuelo, Juan Soriano, Antonio López, Luis Gordillo, Cildo Meireles, Antoni Muntadas, Doris Salcedo, Artur Barrio, Jaume Plensa, Esther Ferrer, Isidoro Valcárcel, Marta Minujín, Concha Jerez , Antoni Miralda, Cecilia Vicuña, Soledad Sevilla and Tania Bruguera.
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