Lúa Coderch's meditations win the first ARCO Antoni Vila Casas Award

MadridThe Vila Casas Foundation has an increasingly prominent role in the State, thanks to the exhibitions of the artists in its collection that it organizes in museums such as the Lázaro Galdiano Museum in Madrid and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo (CGAC) in Santiago de Compostela, in a program called Puntos de Fuga. To further enhance this, the foundation organizes a prize within Arco, of which the winner has just been announced: the Catalan artist of Peruvian origin Lúa Coderch (Iquitos, Peru, 1982), represented by the Àngels Barcelona gallery. The award includes the acquisition of a work and the organization of an exhibition at the Can Framis museum.

"For us this award is important because we can also promote collecting and gallery-ownership, in line with the The art of collecting "We will be launching this project in 2026," explains the general director of the Vila Casas Foundation, Joan Torras. "Before, our work was totally local, but as the Puntos de Fuga program has grown, we have seen the need to strengthen our presence at the most important art fair in Spain," he stresses.

The foundation has purchased You never know what the good news is and Exhausted and exuberant, belonging to the exhibition that the artist will hold at the gallery last year. They are two textile works in which you can see fragments of the artist's lifeline and the mottos that give them their title written in pink satin veins that have a knot. As Coderch says, it is a meditation on how "experience and narrative are interwoven." "We cannot separate them. When we have an experience, in parallel we are always generating a narrative about what happened. It is an internal story, but at the same time it is always collective, it is oriented outwards and towards the community, because we fit our narratives among those of others. In addition, the narratives that we compose about our life are always conditioned" by whether we can generate them in genres such as tragedy, drama or tragicomedy. Likewise, these works are an attempt to find a meaning to these experiences from a broader perspective.

A multidisciplinary artist

You never know what the good news is and Exhausted and exuberant They correspond to two mottos that the artist herself often repeats, because they refer to "important lessons" that she has learned throughout her life. You never know which ones... It evokes the need for more perspective to interpret good news, and the time afterwards you need to evaluate it and make sense of it. Exhausted and exuberant Lúa Coderch (Iquitos, 1982) represents "the two extremes in the middle of which life develops." "It is a kind of vital tension between these two extremes," she says. Coderch has enhanced the meditative character on the meaning of life in both works by using the "slow and cumulative textile technique."

Lúa Coderch (Iquitos, 1982) is considered one of the most outstanding artists of her generation. Trained as a sculptor, she has developed her work with other languages such as video and sound, according to the problems she wants to address at any given time. Her last solo exhibition in a Barcelona museum was the one dedicated by the Barcelona Contemporary Art Centre to Fabra i Coats, and she is currently working with other artists on a television series sponsored by the Catalan Institute of Cultural Enterprises. "I don't choose the themes of the projects, they come to me, they go through me, and I pour myself into them. And how they become formalized, that comes later. I've made a lot of video and audio because I'm very inclined to write. But in the case of knitting, it's been a learning experience," says Coderch.