Golden Lions
Lifetime Achievement Awards - Biennale Arte 2022
Katharina Fritsch + Cecilia Vicuna
Upon recommendation of the curator, Cecilia Alemani of the 59 International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia - entitled - The Milk of Dreams - until November 27 - the German artist Katharina Fritsch and the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuna are the recipients of the Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement.
Katharina Fritsch - Elefant - Elephant - 1987
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"I feel very honoured and thankful about this prize."
Katharina Fritsch
1956 - Essen Germany - Lives - Wuppertal + Dusseldorf - Germany
“The first time I saw one of Katharina Fritsch’s works in person was actually in Venice, at the first Biennale I ever attended, the 1999 edition curated by Harald Szeemann. The massive piece filling the main room at the Central Pavilion was titled Rattenkonig, the Rat King, a disquieting sculpture in which a group of giant rodents is crouched in a circle with their tails knotted together, like some strange magic ritual. Every time I’ve encountered one of Fritsch’s sculptures in the years since, I’ve felt the same sense of awe and dizzying attraction. Fritsch’s contribution to the field of contemporary art, especially sculpture, has been incomparable. She creates figurative works that are both hyperrealistic and fanciful: copies of objects, animals, and people, faithfully rendered in every detail, but transformed into uncanny apparitions. Fritsch often alters the scale of her subjects, shrinking them down or vastly enlarging them, and coating them in disorienting solid colours: it feels like one is looking at monuments from an alien civilisation, or artefacts on display in a strange posthuman museum.” writes Cecilia Alemani.
We are Breaking our ship sinking Venice and other lands.
Fraga, is the root of 'fragile' and 'failure':
our failure to care for earth.
Nau Fraga journeys to the memory of the lagoon,
its grasses and the stories held by the cords twined by its first peoples.
May the rustle of its twigs move our hearts
to care for Her, our Earth ship.
Cecilia Vicuna Curator Cecilia Alemani writes: Cecilia Vicuna 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. Vicuna 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, Vicuna 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.
Cecilia Vicuna - NAUfraga - site-specific - installation 2022
a work dedicated to the Venice Lagoon
Nau Fraga, from navis - ship + frangere - to break
She Illuminates what is.
The eye is zero sex and emptiness
are the hole in the wheel that spins the world.
One could think that it is the "eye of instinct"
that open when we allow ourselves to be carried
away by a form of knowledge that is richer
and deeper than rationality. It could be that
the eyes are hidden in the hair, waiting "to see."
Cecilia Vicuna - Bogota - 1977
Cecilia Vicuna - Leoparda de Ojitos - 1976
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"It is a great honor and a joy for me to receive the Golden Lion Award - 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 Vicuna
1948 - Santiago - Chile - Lives - New york City - USA
I dreamt I had to eat evil doers, digest them,
and defecate them for my shit to fertilize
the land, so a new civilization can be born.
Cecilia Vicuna
Cecilia Vicuna - The Comegente - The People Eater - 2019
after the lost original of 1971
