Descripción del Premio
The German artist Katharina Fritsch and the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña are the recipients of the Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement of the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia - The Milk of Dreams (Giardini and Arsenale, April 23 - November 27, 2022).
The decision was approved by La Biennale’s Board of Directors chaired by Roberto Cicutto, upon recommendation of the Curator of the 59th International Art Exhibition, Cecilia Alemani.
The awards ceremony and inauguration of the 59th Exhibition, which will open to the public at 11 am on that same day, will be held on April 23rd, 2022 at Ca’ Giustinian, the headquarters of La Biennale di Venezia.
Cecilia Vicuña
“Vicuña is an artist and a poet, and has devoted years of invaluable effort to preserving the work of many Latin American writers, translating and editing anthologies of poetry that might otherwise have been lost. Vicuña is also an activist who has long fought for the rights of Indigenous peoples in Chile and the rest of Latin America. In the visual arts, her work has ranged from painting, to performance, all the way to complex assemblages. Her artistic language is built around a deep fascination with Indigenous traditions and non-Western epistemologies. For decades, Vicuña has travelled her own path, doggedly, humbly, and meticulously, anticipating many recent ecological and feminist debates and envisioning new personal and collective mythologies. Many of her installations are made with found objects or scrap materials, woven into delicate compositions where microscopic and monumental seem to find a fragile equilibrium: a precarious art that is both intimate and powerful.”
"It is a great honor and a joy for me to receive the Golden Lion Award - said Cecilia Vicuña - at a time when humanity is trying to keep peace and justice against all odds. I believe our art and consciousness can play a role in the urgent need to move away from violence and destruction, to save our environment from impeding collapse. Venice is particularly meaningful to me. Some of my paternal ancestors came to Chile from Northern Italy in the 19th century, so I learned to love its history and art as a child. My grandparents would be honored to know of the Award. My maternal line is indigenous, so I am very proud to be part of the Biennale Arte curated by Cecilia Alemani, that highlights “artists imagining a posthuman condition challenging the presumed Western condition using the white man as a measure of all things.“ I am joined by an extraordinary set of artists sharing in the spirit of “The Milk of Dreams” we badly need to find a new way of being in this Earth."
Cecilia Vicuña (1948) is a poet, artist, filmmaker and activist. She lives and works in New York and Santiago. Her work addresses pressing concerns of the modern world including ecological destruction, human rights, and cultural homogenization. Born and raised in Santiago, she was exiled in the early 1970s after the violent military coup against President Salvador Allende.
Vicuña coined the term “Arte Precario” in the mid 1960s in Chile, for her precarious works and quipus, as a way of “hearing an ancient silence waiting to be heard.” Her impermanent multi-dimensional works begin as a poem, or as an image that morphs into a film, a song, a sculpture, or a collective performance. Her paintings of the early 1970s de-colonised the art of the conquerors and the “saints” inherited from the Catholic Church to create irreverent images of the heroes of the revolution. Her work is characterised by a desire to pay tribute to the indigenous history and culture of Chile.
Vicuña received her M.F.A. from the National School of Fine Arts, University of Chile and continued with postgraduate studies at Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Recent solo exhibitions include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA (forthcoming 2022); Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M), Madrid, Spain (2021); MUAC, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico (2020); and Kunstinstituut Melly Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2019). Her work is in numerous private and public collections, including Tate, London; MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Guggenheim Museum; The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Santiago; MALBA, Museo Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL. Vicuña is the author of 27 volumes of art and poetry published in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Her filmography includes documentaries, animation, and visual poems. Vicuña has received several awards, including the Premio Velázquez de Artes Plásticas, Madrid, Spain (2019); Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, Santa Monica, CA (2019); Anonymous Was a Woman Award, New York, NY (1999); and The Andy Warhol Foundation Award, New York, NY (1997). In 2015 she was appointed The Messenger Lecturer at Cornell University.
She is the co-founder of www.oysi.org.
Exposición. 19 nov de 2024 - 02 mar de 2025 / Museo Nacional del Prado / Madrid, España
Formación. 23 nov de 2024 - 29 nov de 2024 / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) / Madrid, España
