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The artist Alberto Peral has been awarded the 3rd Bosch Aymerich Foundation Sculpture Prize for his work Splashing Mies, a site-specific intervention in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona, created in November 2024.

The Jury, which awarded the prize unanimously, is made up of: Ainhoa Grandes, president of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art Foundation (MACBA) and president of the jury; Andrés Escarpenter, patron of the Bosch Aymerich Foundation; Nuria Enguita, artistic director of the Lisbon Museum of Contemporary Art; Alexandra Laudo, independent curator; and Juan Várez, collector and patron of the ARCO Foundation and the ABC Museum Foundation.

The Jury, which highlighted the high standard of all the works submitted, emphasised the conceptual and formal dialogue that Splashing Mies establishes with the architecture and history of the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion. Through a series of sculptural gestures, the intervention introduces movement, sound and time through the circulation of water, articulating reflection, vibration and flow. In this way, the work establishes a conversation with different elements of the building such as surfaces, materials and furniture. It also highlights the coherence and subtlety of each component of the work, which transforms perception through minimal interventions capable of altering the character of the place in which it is deployed. The piece thus develops a variation of the spatial and temporal experience from a particular relationship between sculpture and architecture.

Alberto Peral conceives his work in the Mies van der Rohe pavilion as a search for balance and an example of how art and architecture can dialogue. He argues that the ideal relationship is ‘collaborative, of joint projects from the outset’, an option that is little explored but nevertheless very fertile. In this framework, his intervention is perceived as an ephemeral gesture with pieces like ghostly presences, destined to disappear in a few days. For him, as for Mies and Lilly Reich, the intervention reflects ‘that immateriality, that mirage in which we move and in which we live’.