ANTONIO PICHILLÁ QUIACAÍN: THE ARTIST NOMINATED FOR EFG LATIN AMERICA ART AWARD AT ArtBo

The EFG Latin America Art Award, in partnership with ArtNexus, presented Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín of San Pedro La Laguna, (Guatemala, 1982), represented by Galería Elvira Moreno, Bogotá, (Colombia), as the nominated artist for its annual acquisition award.

Anudar y desanudar (Knotting and Unknotting) is the title of Antonio Pichillá's work, an oil on canvas. It is a diptych: one yellow panel and the other red, joined by two plastic gestures, one black and the other white. The four colors of corn.

His indigenous Mayan origin, Tz'utujil, brings to contemporary art the inclusion of another palette of colors, different from Mondrian's red, blue and yellow, to offer the viewer the color earth, the fabric and its dyes, the ceramics of thousands of yellows transformed by fire and corn. But it also offers forgotten ritual forms such as knots, which are above all utilitarian acts that can be used to build houses and buildings and pyramids without weight and without tools. And symbolic acts that, in this work, must be looked at carefully because Pichillá has painted two forms that intertwine like a knot, and at the same time seem independent, with the will to untangle what is tangled and untie what is tied. Not by chance, two threads hang from this form beyond the limits of the painting, as if to remind the viewer that art dialogues with oil painting and the formal synthesis of modern art, why not, but that it needs to make the threads visible as an ancestral path, as a tear or as a possibility.

The work was selected at the ArtBo fair with the collaboration of Natalia Gutiérrez Echeverri, Anthropologist, PhD in art theory, professor at the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá, together with Celia Sredni de Birbragher, Director and Editor of ArtNexus.

The EFG Latin America Art Award celebrates its fourteenth edition to continue its commitment to support the production of Latin American artists. Through a jury at various contemporary art fairs in Latin America, the works of various artists from the region are pre-selected and the final winner is announced. The award aims to promote the continent's visual arts production and fairs among collectors around the world, with the strategic development of Liaisons.

During this edition, the fairs where the pre-selection took place were: SP Arte, São Paulo; Pinta PArC, Lima; arteba, Buenos Aires; Ch.ACO, Santiago de Chile and ArtBo, Bogota.

As in previous years, the final acquisition will be announced at Pinta Miami during the week of Art Basel.  EFG Capital will acquire a representative artwork by the winning artist. The entire EFG Latin America Art Award collection is on permanent display at EFG Capital's Miami office.