2015 Joan Miró Prize Winner: Ignasi Aballí

Fundació Joan Miró
Parc de Montjuïc
08038 Barcelona
Spain

info@fundaciomiro-bcn.org

The Fundació Joan Miró and “la Caixa” Foundation are pleased to announce the 2015 Joan Miró Prize winner: Ignasi Aballí. In addition to a Euro 70,000 cash prize, Ignasi Aballí will be given the opportunity to present an exhibition at Fundació Joan Miró in 2016. The artist will also receive a solid-titanium trophy, an original design by André Ricard.

Rosa Maria Malet, director of the Fundació Joan Miró, and Elisa Durán, general director of “la Caixa” Foundation, read the jury’s statement and presented Ignasi Aballí, Joan Miró Prize winner, during a ceremony at Fundació Joan Miró last week.

The jury of the 2015 Joan Miró Prize was composed of Alfred Pacquement, former director of the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris); Vicente Todolí, artistic director at Hangar Bicocca (Milan) and former director of the Tate Modern (London); Poul Erik Tøjner, director of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Humlebæk, Denmark; Rosa Maria Malet, director of Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona); and Nimfa Bisbe, director of “la Caixa” Foundation’s Contemporary Art Collection. In selecting the winner, the members of the jury took under consideration aspects such as creative freedom and innovative research, both key values in the work of Joan Miró.

In the case of Ignasi Aballí, the jury highlighted “his constant questioning of the boundaries of painting and representation and his careful attention to the major implications of the slightest shifts in resignification strategies, as well as his role as a mentor for younger artists.”

Ignasi Aballí (b. 1958, Barcelona) studied Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona. His work has been exhibited in a number of international museums, such as MACBA (Barcelona), Museu Serralves (Porto), Ikon Gallery (Birmingham), The Drawing Center (New York), ZKM (Karlsruhe), and at the Venice Biennale in 2007, as well as in art galleries in Spain, Mexico, Belgium, Brazil and China.

Aballí has explored the process of creating without direct intervention, using time or chance as his allies. For him, it is important not to create from the subjectivity of the artist, but through detached methods related to science, classification or basic routines. From daily life and his immediate surroundings, Aballí extracts not only his subject matter but also the materials his works are made of: the light coming through his studio windows, the dust that accumulates on his desk, the Tipp-Ex liquid which corrects his mistakes, the newspapers he reads every day.

Some of his most significant works are newspaper clipping series in which Aballí uses classification as a strategy to respond to issues he is concerned with. Remarkable are also his series of inventories, such as Sky (2011), a catalog of different chromatic hues of the sky in the form of collage, or Color charts (1995–1997), in which the artist orders colors according to different criteria, from their physical properties to their cultural connotations.

His reflection on painting as an activity and as a medium is the center of another line of inquiry developed in works such as Waste (2000), in which open paint cans are allowed to dry. In the words of the artist “they dried while I was thinking what to do with them,” a strong metaphor for his own artistic development.

Aballí has also used video in works like Disappearances (2003), where he reinterpreted an unrealized film script by Georges Perec. Reading between the lines and silent lapses are also present in 0-24 h (2006), Projection Film (2012) andThis Is not The End (2012).

2015 marks the fifth edition of the Joan Miró Prize, which is awarded every two years. Previous winners of the Prize are Olafur Eliasson (2007), Pipilotti Rist (2009), Mona Hatoum (2011) and Roni Horn (2013).