2023-10-24 13:55:01
Updated Tuesday, October 24, 2023 – 18:24
The jury values the Bilban artist for her early discovery of digital language and its ethical application.
Marisa Gonzlez.PEDRO J. PACHECOThe New Reina Sofa Time.news of the 70s
The Bilban artist Marisa Gonzalez (1943) has received the 2023 Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts, organized by the Ministry of Education and Culture and endowed with 100,000 euros. The award jury has highlighted Marisa Gonzlez for “her extensive career as a multimedia artist, pioneer in the use of new technologies from the 70s to the present”. Furthermore, the jury noted that “feminism, memory and industrial archaeology, recycling and ecology, and attention to the processes of exclusion and precariousness are other notes that characterize her career. Tireless gleaner of archives, documents and industrial archaeology, always committed to social inequalities and ecological threats in our globalized world.
Marisa Gonzlez has been working with computer language since the time when faxes and photocopiers They were cutting-edge technology. After studying piano at the Bilbao Conservatory and Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid (1971), he went to the United States to study generative systems applied to art in Chicago and Washington DC. At that time, binary codes were a new aesthetic. and uncertain that González linked with the tradition of abstract art: repetition, fractalization, sequence… The language of the most intellectual art of the 20th century found its best expression in the repertoire of machines
“When I returned to Spain, I had my first exhibition in Evelyn Botella’s gallery, which was called Ele. I found that in Spain there were still no color photocopiers, that copies had to be brought from the United States. And I remember that the The greatest effort was to take maximum care of the paper and the framing because we knew what was going to happen: that the spectators would come with a magnifying glass to catch me,” Gonzlez tells EL MUNDO on the morning of his Velázquez Award. “I have been very alone but that has helped me to be completely independent.”
There is another memory that expresses Gonzlez’s disruptive value and that explains his relationship with art: when he entered Fine Arts, defying the plans of his parents who preferred that he look for a boyfriend, Antonio Lopez He was his painting teacher. López spoke to his students about art as a journey of introspection that leads people to understand their past, and González rebelled. He told her that she was not interested in the past but in the future, she left the classroom and did not return to that class.
It was the eve of ’68 and González participated in a spirit of the time that mixed political dissidence with the break with what was considered a nineteenth-century and bourgeois idea of artThe artist later said that her desire to break with the old and be in the new was what led her to the United States, to enroll in everything that seemed foreign to the old world.
González’s method would often consist of starting work in photography, in something similar to photojournalism, or in video and taking its results to the then new technological tools to turn them into something different. Some of these reports were pieces about violence, stories of femicides and rapes, portraits of nuclear fear… Another classic topic for González was industrial archeology and the socioeconomic essay, many times seen from irony or from the interest in the grotesque. Vengeful Famosa dolls, aberrant fruits deformed by GMOs, thermal power plants converted into vampire landscapes, Filipino domestics in Hong Kong, on their day off…
There is a paradox in Marisa Gonzlez’s story: her artwork is often funny, compassionate, and kind. The theoretical account of those same works, on the other hand, sounds challenging.. “Challenging is a word that I like but I don’t know if I fit it well. Now that they have given me the Velzquez Prize, I receive calls from many people who say they are very happy.” Do you know that phrase from Salvador Pniker, which said that he wrote so that people would love him? “I didn’t know her but I’m going to make her mine. In part I know that I have been a defiant artist, I have dealt with the topic of rape when no one was dealing with it… I was pioneer in feminism as well as in technology. But what I want in life is to be a good person, good for others.”
And how is it with ancient art, at this point? “I don’t get along badly. I’m not one of those ladies who go to the Prado Museum every month but I don’t get along badly. The thing is that there are already enough historians, enough artists who talk about the past. I want the future, the future, the future. … 2023 seems like a good time for art to me. There are a thousand avenues open and art is no longer judged by its format. But the wars have me crazy.”
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