Carreras
Mugica

The artist Azucena Vieites (Hernani, 1967) has received the National Graphic Art Award, the most important prize in this artistic genre awarded in Spain, in recognition of the importance that multiplicity, reproduction, and copying play in the strategies of contemporary visual culture, low-fi practices, and gender activism that characterize her creative proposals.

Through the ongoing editing of the extensive collection of images that make up Azucena Vieites' work, the exhibition offers an aesthetic memory of various moments in her career.

The jury for the National Graphic Art Award was made up of Ángeles Albert, Director General of Cultural Heritage and Fine Arts, Nekane Aramburu, Director of the Apel.les Fenosa Foundation, and Yolanda Romero, Head of the Conservation Division of the Bank of Spain.

The communicative and critical possibilities of the image, using parameters close to the languages of graphic art, have been present in various creations by Azucena Vieites. The jury also valued her theoretical approach to issues inherent in the multiple image and her transmission of knowledge through teaching.

Feminism and punk DIY (Do It Yourself) culture are common sources in the artist's iconography. The questioning of technical virtuosity explodes the single image as an absolute visual product through a multiplicity of sequences that dismantle narrative logic. Her images are renewed and recycled using devices such as quotation, appropriation, interventions on the idea of the original and the copy, processes of resignification, feminist thought, and gender politics associated with subcultures.

Vieites uses images taken from art and fashion magazines, album covers, fanzines, photographs, posters, banners, and feminist publications. The reworked images expose the cultural fabric that constitutes them through repetition, serialization, and remakes. The artist rarely focuses on a complete image. Instead, she proposes constellations of fragments. Vieites' ongoing work in Erreakzioa-Reacción, a collective between art and feminism that emerged in 1994, was framed within these premises. She uses inexpensive materials such as photocopies and cardboard and simple artistic languages such as drawing, collage, and screen printing. Her silkscreen prints can be arranged into an open fanzine on the wall and serve to translate images. In the artist's own words, "silkscreen printing allows me to obtain an image over and over again; this technique makes us think about the idea of the original, the copy, the unique, serial, or reproducible work. In the effect of repetition, what is represented fades away, becomes distorted. The image is constructed from this repetitive effect that exceeds the representation itself and distorts it. From my point of view, one of the raisons d'être of artistic practice has to do with the ability to provoke strangeness."

A similar dynamic is adopted in her work with moving images, which take as their reference point experimental productions in video art and others close to the language of music videos.