Fina Miralles receives the National Prize for Fine Arts

BarcelonaThe artist Fina Miralles (Sabadell, 1950) is the winner of this year's National Visual Arts Award "for her pioneering role since the 1970s within the framework of feminism and early environmentalist positions, vindicating the relationship between human beings and nature," as stated in the statement released by the ministry. The award was made public by the ministry. 30,000 euros. "I wondered when they would wake up the people of Madrid. It was time," Miralles said this Monday upon learning that she had won the award and after recalling that in 2018 she had already received the National Visual Arts Award granted by the Generalitat.

Traditionally, she has been linked to the land art and in the relationships between the body and nature, as well as with political criticism and the structures of patriarchy. But in the 1980s and 1990s, Miralles took a turn and began exploring the field of painting after an initiatory trip to Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru. "I couldn't handle the character anymore. I'd said enough!" the artist said in 2023 on the occasion of a major exhibition dedicated to him. the Vila Casas Foundation in the Volart Spaces.

"For me, climbing trees was the most normal thing in the world. I'm a woman of the earth. I was doing all this as a tantrum. I've never done art. They hung a sign on me that says 'artist'. That's fine with me because they let me do what I wanted. I practice art to earn a living," she had said three years earlier, coinciding with the exhibition dedicated to her at the Macba, I am all that I have been"I've done it and it's done me. And I've finished what I promised and the work I was obligated to do. I won't die with the brush in my mouth," she emphasized. "I didn't want to turn my work into money. That's why this award is fantastic," says Miralles.

Born in Sabadell in 1950, Miralles trained in Barcelona and spent long periods in South America, France, and Italy. Her early works include Still life (1972), Tree-woman (1973) and Relationship of the body with natural elements in everyday actions (1975). During this period she was linked to emblematic spaces of the Catalan avant-garde such as the Sala Vinçon, Sala Tres and the Espai 13 of the Fundació Joan Miró.

After venturing into the field of painting, where projects such as Double horizon, her work became more introspective. Miralles finds art to be "sacred," and has always shunned the commercialization of art. "Since it wasn't sold, there were no hard feelings, no jealousy, no blows. It was beautiful," she recalled of her conceptual years. "I was the only one who had studied Fine Arts," she added, "and I ended up cursing everything: painting, representation, the world of reality. And then, to cursing everything, I made the table ofStill life, with leaves, stones, water, to fuck with the still life of still lifes."

The introspective nature of Miralles's art, based in Cadaqués since the turn of the century, has a spiritual and shamanic side, a result of her time in Latin America. "Submerged within herself, Fina Miralles reinterprets the creative act as a return to the dawn of ancient cultures and ancient truths, celebrating creativity as a sacred gift that travels through the spiral of time, embracing drawing and writing as ways of opening up to the invisible," the commissions say. From indigenous cultures, Miralles learned a way of seeing the world in which all of Mother Nature's creatures are endowed with life and are part of a sacred whole; the study of Eastern art and philosophy opened the doors of perception to emptiness and expressive silence. He learned to tune the strings of his heart, to let himself be guided, to transform the creative act into a temple and thus enter into harmony with the cosmic order."

The donation to the Sabadell Art Museum

Among his most relevant exhibitions and interventions are: Of ideas in life (Sabadell Museum, 2001), the Carol from the Joan Miró Foundation of Barcelona (2014), Natural Natures 1973-2016 (National Archaeological Museum, 2016). Fina Miralles's work is present in prominent museums such as the Sabadell Art Museum, to which she donated her entire oeuvre, the Reina Sofía Museum, and the MACBA. In 2018, she was awarded the National Visual Arts Prize, granted by the National Council of Culture and the Arts of the Generalitat (Catalan Government). But, more than institutional recognition, what nourishes Miralles is, above all, "the relationship with people, with nature, and that feeling of feeling alive and fulfilled," as she said at the time. an interview in the ARA.