ONLINE EXHIBITION OF THE ITAÚ VISUAL ARTS AWARD

The show is composed of 64 works from artists from all over the Argentine country and representative of multiple disciplines of art. Among them are three robotic art pieces, distinguished in the section dedicated to new technologies. As every year, the Award has promoted the visibility and recognition of the most recent expressions of contemporary art in the country, including multiple disciplines and aesthetic profiles.

The aim is to make known virtually, and in the best conditions, the recognized artists and winners of the Itaú Prize for Visual Arts 2019/2020. For this reason, the digital catalog of the finalist works can be consulted online, a version specially prepared for this circumstance by Adriana Lauria (curator, essays and editing) and Eugenia Garay Basualdo (coordination and biographies).

In it, one can read the full version of the text that the curator produced to accompany the exhibition, in which, in addition to considerations about the particular situation of the development of the Prize -which began with the idea of ​​being held in-person and culminated with an online development- , conceptualizes the corpus of works grouping them into curatorial nuclei –thematic and aesthetic, which also organize the exhibition in Google Arts & Culture–, analyzing in each one the particularities and meaning of each work. As a complement, on the pages where the reproductions of the works appear, a link has been provided to the audiovisuals that show the works corresponding to the disciplines of video, video installation, video performance, sound installation and animation, as well as those that show the ‘behind the scenes’ of the operation and procedures of interactive and and documental works.

The Awards jury, made up of Virginia Agote, Jorge La Ferla and Cristian Segura, commented on the quality and variety of the works submitted, representing a diverse spectrum, of which they highlighted:

The First Prize for the video installation Instancias de lucha (Instances of struggle) by Gabriela Golder (CABA), based on records of workers from recovered factories in Buenos Aires.

The Second Prize to the young Tucuman artist Adrián Sosa (Monteros, lives in Los Sosa, Tucumán) for the video performance Casa, el abrasar del cerco (Home, to hug the hedge) in which he proposes a reading of the landscape of his region as a co-starring setting for his performances.

The Third Prize to Néstor Barbitta (CABA, lives between Buenos Aires and Berlin) for his photographic work, Partido (Match), in which he gives an account of a border area between the city and the province of Buenos Aires, seen from a drone.

Likewise, Rocío Fernández Charro (Adrogué, lives in Lomas de Zamora, Prov. Of Buenos Aires) was awarded the Fundación Luz Austral Scholarship to participate in the 2020 National Portfolio Forum for her work Retratos (Portraits) . Also, two Scholarships were awarded from the El Mirador Foundation to participate in the "Artists x Artists" program: to Ramiro Pasch (San Nicolás, province of Buenos Aires, lives in Rosario, Santa Fe) for his drawing Meditación primera sobre la naturaleza de un espacio fragmentado (First Meditation on the nature of a fragmented space), and to Lihuel González (CABA), for his photography Un paisaje no deja de existir aunque le demos la espalda (A landscape does not cease to exist even if we turn our back on it).

The First Prize in the special category of Robotic Art was awarded by the jury formed by Mariela Yeregui, Malena Souto Arena and Emiliano Causa, to Displaced, a work done by Robotícula (Ana Laura Cantera and Demian Ferrari, Monte Grande and Quilmes, province of Buenos Aires). In addition, the jury handed two Honorable Mentions to Gabriela Munguía (Mexico, lives in CABA) for Particle Resonance and to Leo Nuñez (CABA) for Reprofiling.