Application deadline: May 15, 2015
Botín Foundation
Santander
Spain
www.fundacionbotin.org/workshops
Julie Mehretu (Ethiopia, 1971), an African artist who lives in New York, will direct the Visual Arts Workshop—from June 29 to July 10, 2015—in Santander, Spain. The Botín Foundation has organized its annual workshop event for the last 22 years. The artist will select 15 artists from different parts of the world, and for two weeks they will exchange experiences, reflecting on the “global crisis and the fragmentation of the world around us.”
Since 1994 the Visual Arts Workshops at Villa Iris have brought young artists to Santander to work closely with artists of the stature of Juan Uslé, Gabriel Orozco, Julião Sarmento, Miroslaw Balka, Antoni Muntadas, Jannis Kounellis, Mona Hatoum, Paul Graham, Tacita Dean and Carlos Garaicoa.
The participants in this workshop, which will be held in English, will be selected from among the online applications received by the Botín Foundation until May 15 (refer to the conditions of entry here). The final list of selected participants will be announced after June 5.
During the workshop, participants will delve deeply into “issues of responsibility, intuition and creation” and they will formulate, by means of new expressive devices, “alternative and imaginative proposals” related to the times we are living in—which are, according to the artist, “a worldwide state of dysfunction and crisis in which nations are disintegrating, values are weakening and culture is being destroyed.”
In her large-scale paintings Julie Mehretu superimposes layers of historical events, memories, sensations and life experiences. A whirlwind of visual blasts which pursues harmony and conveys vigorously, with a masterful use of colour, the artist’s concern for her time.
