Estampa PRIZE

Irene Infantes for her piece Untitled, from the Alarcón Criado gallery, and Mercedes Pimiento, for her work Untitled, from the Isabel Hurley gallery, have been awarded the Comunidad de Madrid 2023 Estampa Prize.

This is the Region’s way of recognising the significance of the Estampa Contemporary Art Fair and affirming the regional government’s support for contemporary creativity in all its forms, as well as supporting galleries and programmes that aim to spread and promote contemporary art. This acquisition award helps build the region’s collections at the CA2M by adding important new voices.

2025 ESTAMPA PRIZE: SUSANNA INGLADA

Susanna Inglada (Banyeres Penedès, 1983) examines power relations, authority, corruption, complicity and gender inequality, adopting a critical and socially committed standpoint.  Drawing inspiration from the culture, history and politics that surround her, the artist creates installations and drawings that operate as chapters in a story in which these themes are developed through attractive bodies in tension and constant struggle. With a training in visual arts (in Barcelona, the Netherlands and Belgium) and theatre (at La Casona in Barcelona), her work possesses a strong theatrical component. The figures she draws—often on a life-size scale—are cut out, mounted and installed in the space like actors on a stage. Viewers find themselves immersed in intensely emotional theatrical scenes, almost to the extent of becoming actors themselves or readers of an illustrated book that springs to life around them.

Susanna Inglada (Banyeres del Penedés, Spain, 1983). Based in the Netherlands, Susanna Inglada has received solid international training. She has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona and completed her studies with theatre training at the drama school La Casona, also in Barcelona. She subsequently obtained a master's degree in painting from the Frank Mohr Institute (Groningen, NL) and then completed her training with an advanced studies programme at HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Ghent, BE). She has presented her work at institutions like the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo El Mèdol (Tarragona), the Drawing Centre Diepenheim (NL), the Folkwang Museum (Essen, DE), the Academia de España in Rome and the gallery PalmaDotze (ES). She has also taken part in events like the biennials Into Nature (Drenthe), Coup de Ville (St. Niklaas), Sint-Denijs City (BE) and CODA Paper Art (Apeldoorn).

The jury members for the prize were the general director of Culture and Creative Industries of the Regional Government of Madrid, Manuel Lagos; the director of the Museo del CA2M, Tania Pardo; the deputy general director of Fine Arts for the region of Madrid, Asunción Cardona Suanzes; the plastic arts adviser of the Regional Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Sport, Juana Arana; the arts administrator, curator and contemporary art critic Bea Espejo; and the member of the artwork acquisition advisory committee of the Regional Government of Madrid, Armando Montesinos. The ESTAMPA PRIZE was first awarded in 2008 and rewards the outstanding talent of one of artists featured in the annual edition of the ESTAMPA ARTE MÚLTIPLE Fair.

2024 ESTAMPA PRIZE: TERESA GANCEDO

Teresa Gancedo was born in León in 1937 and spent her youth in Madrid until 1960. She subsequently moved to Barcelona, where she studied Fine Arts at the Escuela Superior de San Jorge. In 1972 she held her first exhibition at the Sala Provincia in León. That debut was followed by numerous exhibitions both in Spain and abroad, including New Images from Spain, in 1980, when she was one of a small group of Spanish painters in a show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The other eight Spanish artists featured in the show were Sergi Aguilar, Darío Villalba, Zush, Carmen Calvo, Guillermo Pérez Villalta, Miquel Navarro, Muntadas/Serrán Pagán and Jordi Teixidor. Her work is also included in the museum’s collection. From 1982 until 2022 she was a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Barcelona. In 2018 the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC) dedicated an extensive retrospective to her work.

Among the notable collections that have acquired the artist’s work are the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; Artium, Centro Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo in Álava; the CAAC, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville; the MACBA, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona; and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.

2023 ESTAMPA PRIZE IRENE INFANTES AND MERCEDES PIMIENTO 

IRENE INFANTES

Irene Infantes (Seville, 1989) works mainly with textiles and, in particular, with wool and how it has been used throughout history. Of her solo exhibitions the ones held at the Galería Alarcón Criado in 2021 and at García Galería in 2019 are particularly noteworthy. Her work is part of collections in places such as the Andalusian Centre for Contemporary Art, the MKG Museum in Hamburg and the University of the Arts in London. Her piece Untitled, 2023, is a textile piece in the form of a large hieroglyphic with which she evokes both Andalusian textiles and the cosmology of the Nasa, an indigenous people of the Andean region of Colombia, for whom learning to weave is a fundamental part of the growth and development of women's way of thinking. This piece includes small bags reminiscent of jigras (traditional net bags), which indigenous women offer to their children and husbands as a symbol of the weaving of life, evolution and thought. 

MERCEDES PIMIENTO

The work of Mercedes Pimiento (Seville, 1990) focuses on investigating the way in which human beings relate to the spaces they inhabit, with particular attention paid to the processes of construction and manufacture through which human beings define their environment. She has had solo exhibitions at the Galería Nogueras-Blanchard in Barcelona in 2023 and at the Fundación Arranz-Bravo, in Hospitalet de Llobregat (Barcelona), among others. She has also taken part in Generación 2023, at La Casa Encendida and the Fundación Montemadrid. Her piece Untitled, 2023, made with beeswax, silicone and steel, belongs to the series Superficie neutra (Neutral Surface) and is a formal essay on the encounter between the body, architecture and the substances that flow between them. The result is a system of modular objects whose size and morphology evoke both construction elements and objects of the domestic space (bed, bathtub or washbasin), which interact with the body.

Estampa Prize 2022

Irene de Andrés (Ibiza, 1986)

Victoria Encinas (1962) 

Estampa Prize 2021

Ixone Sádaba (Bilbao, 1977) 

SEE WINNING WORKS FROM PREVIOUS YEARS  HERE