Elda Cerrato has been awarded the Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts, corresponding to the year 2022, at the proposal of the jury that met today. The prize is endowed with 100,000 euros.
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The jury singled out Elda Cerrato “for her wide-ranging and sustained experimental artistic work, until recently little recognised. In her work, apparently unconnected territories intertwine spiritual searches, esoteric enquiries, radical politicisation, art’s capacity for anticipation, and a special call for attention to the fragility of democratic institutionality in Latin America”.
In addition, the jury pointed out that “Elda Cerrato speaks of memory at the edges to give an account of a trajectory that is illuminated from the margins of movements, institutions and hegemonic artistic tendencies”.
This award from the Ministry of Culture and Sport is endowed with 100,000 euros.
Biography
Elda Cerrato (Asti, Italy, 1930) is a visual artist, teacher and researcher who lives and works in Buenos Aires. The theme of personal and collective memory has always been present in her work, developed through searches through esoteric and political territories or through reflections on absence and presence.
Together with her partner, the experimental musician Luis Zubillaga, she was part of the first groups of the mystic master Gurdjeff in Latin America and other alternative spiritual and philosophical searches since the 1950s. In the 60s she was very close to Aldo Pellegrini, Juan Carlos Paz, Oscar Masotta, linked to the Instituto Di Tella and later to the CAYC. Together with Juan Carlos Romero, she was part of the foundation of SUAP (Sindicato Único de Artistas Plásticos). She lived in Venezuela in the 1960s and during the last military dictatorship in Argentina. There she was actively involved in the cultural milieu of Caracas and, in particular, in the group El Techo de la Ballena (The Roof of the Whale).
In the aftermath of the dictatorship, her work calls attention to the threats to democratic life, in the continuing context of the political and social economic crisis in Argentina.
In 2015, the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires, where she taught, published ‘La memoria en los bordes’, which brings together her archives, along with texts by different authors and researchers. In 2021, the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires organised an anthological exhibition of her work under the title ‘El día maravilloso de los pueblos’. She is currently working with her son Luciano Zubillaga on the audiovisual project ‘Family Reunion’.