Miguel Marcos, Mayoral, Artur Ramon Art, Palmadotze, RocioSantaCruz and the 'Miró-Picasso' exhibition, awarded with the GAC Awards

The seventeenth Nit del Galerisme has delivered a catalog of prizes divided into proposals, trends and styles. The trajectories of the artist Jordi Pericot and the gallerist Miguel Marcos; the programs of the Mayoral, A|34, Artur Ramon Art, Palmadotze and RocioSantaCruz galleries; the Miró-Picasso exhibition; the Banco Sabadell Art Collection; the critic Eudald Camps, and the supplement Babelia have received distinctions.

The GAC Awards - organized by the association Galeries d'Art de Catalunya and the association Art Barcelona - were presented today at the Macba, as part of the seventeenth edition of the Gallery Night, the main social event in the world of the arts in Catalonia. The list of prizes this year has been particularly varied in styles and scopes and allows to obtain an accurate picture and the multifaceted reality of the arts in Catalonia.

The event was attended by the Minister of Culture, Natàlia Garriga; Xavier Marcé, Councilor for Culture and Creative Industries of Barcelona City Council; Pau González, president of the Culture Area of the Barcelona Provincial Council, and Edgar Garcia Casellas, director of the ICEC, among other institutional and civil society representatives. During the event, the president of the GAC, Benito Padilla, spoke, who called for a "courageous and active attitude from the sector as a whole, but also from Catalan society to position the arts in a central role in the country".

The GAC Awards are made up of eleven distinctions. Two (the trajectories of an artist and a gallerist) are decided by the two convening entities, while the other nine are in charge of a jury chaired by Pilar Parcerisas and also made up of the critic Juan Bufill, the artist Gino Rubert, the curator Àlex Mitrani and curator Natalia Chocarro.

Award for a career as an artist:

To Jordi Pericot (El Masnou, 1931). For being one of the references and key figure of the visual arts in Catalonia in the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. His career reflects that of a total artist, who has explored creation, but also study and academic research: he is a visual artist, but also a teacher, film maker, author, editor and promoter of several avant-garde cultural proposals , including the MENTE group.

The plastic work of Jordi Pericot is considered an illustrative exponent of kinetic art, which reflects illusions and perceptual experiences that dialogue with the viewer. His work forms part of the collections of contemporary art museums in Ottawa, Iowa, Helsinki, Santiago de Chile, Madrid, Seville and Ibiza. In 2012, he inaugurated the Jordi Pericot Cinematic Art Space in Masnou, his town.

This award adds to a long list of recognitions and awards throughout his extensive career: Gold Medal for Cultural Merit, awarded by Barcelona City Council (2006); Prize of the Social Council for Quality in Teaching (2011), and Pompeu Fabra University Medal (2012). He is a member of the Royal Academy of Santa Isabel de Hungary, in Seville (since 1988) and of the Royal Catalan Academy of Fine Arts of Sant Jordi (since 2008).

Award for a career as a gallerist:

To Miguel Marcos . To be one of the relevant professionals in the visual arts scene of the last 25 years in Barcelona. Gallerist, cultural manager and collector, Miguel Marcos is a fundamental piece in the projection and internationalization of gallerism, based on rigorous and quality codes.

Creator of his first gallery in 1981 in Zaragoza, in 1988 he settled in Barcelona, from where he has pivoted a solid trajectory of spreading the visual arts and where he has scheduled more than 140 exhibitions in his gallery .

Miguel Marcos has participated in the most relevant fairs in the sector (Arco – of which he has been a member of its organizing committee on several occasions–, Basel, Chicago, Cologne, FIAC, CIGE...). He also has a long career as a curator in institutional exhibitions (those dedicated to Tàpies, Brossa and Arroyo, and others such as La realitat desautorizada and El agua y sus sueños contemporáneos) and has advised several public and private collections.

Collecting Award:

In the Banco Sabadell Art Collection . For its continued tireless support of art, artists and galleries, through one of the richest contemporary art collections in the country, which reflects the state of artistic creation in recent decades in a historical, thematic and evolutionary dimension. The support for art in acquisitions over the last twenty years has significantly enriched this collection, which has contributed to drawing a panorama of high-quality contemporary arts in painting, sculpture and new visual practices and which already they are part of history.

Critic's Award:

In Eudald Fields . For the analysis of the artistic fact through a deep immersion in creation as a cultural fact that crosses disciplines and swings from the past to the present. His training in philosophy and art history allows him to face a dialogue with art from a point of view open to contemporary thought, literature and the visual aesthetics of today's world. Regular contributor to bonart magazine, his writings and opinions on art and artists in Diari de Girona, in catalogs and other publications continue to make writing an essential element in the mediating role of art criticism.

Curator Award:

To Teresa Montaner, Sònia Villegas, Margarida Cortadella and Elena Llorens, for the Miró-Picasso exhibition. For having been an exceptional event, a project of great complexity and ambition brilliantly solved by its curator, in order to point out the cross-relationships between two key figures of modern culture, Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. The Picasso Museum and the Miró Foundation have joined forces to make a complex and tree-like presentation of the theme, with works from the world's main collections. The selection of curators has overcome the difficulties inherent in a project of this magnitude and has achieved double merit; on the one hand, to present key works of great historical importance and great aesthetic impact and, on the other hand, to hone in on the presentation of subtle and lesser-known works in order to document and demonstrate formal, personal and historical connections among the artists. Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso were able to appreciate each other in all their splendor and the public recognized this with their great response.

Award to the media:

A Babelia , cultural supplement of the newspaper El País, to be a reference edition in the Spanish language around the world. The first Babelia, published on October 13, 1991, was presented as follows: "The new cultural supplement, which will consist of 32 pages, wishes to open its pages to everyone, without elitist distinctions. It will be attentive to the demand of official culture, but always with a critical spirit, and in it all those confirmed in the world of arts and letters will find space, as well as all those who are beginning to make their way". With culture the world will become freer. 33 years later it can be said that, thanks to supplements like Babelia, we have more and better arguments to be more critical. Although literature occupies a prominent place, it reviews, with an exceptional critical character, the scenic, plastic, musical and cinematographic billboards of the moment, by the hands of renowned professional specialists in a combinatorial art of communicating vessels that radiates with its own light .

Award to the art gallery for the best programming:

In the Mayoral Gallery . For having excelled in exhibiting artists that we can consider contemporary classics of the 20th century and at the same time exploring new values that can be integrated into the history of current art through their presence in the market. Alongside figures such as Picasso, Antonio Saura, Tàpies and Miró in dialogue, during the year 2023 he has programmed Jordi Alcaraz, Eulàlia Grau and feminisms in the exhibition Breaking the Rules, while seeking a balance between past and present, a coexistence of disparate poetics but linked by a thread of historical connection that allows them to be read later in his gallery in Paris.

Award to the art gallery for the best exhibition. Consolidated artist category:

To Artur Ramon Art by Matter and origin, by Claudi Casanovas . For the renovating role of contemporary ceramics, which this author has shown once again in this exhibition and the capacity of terra cotta to reconcile us with the universe and its origin. We cannot forget that life is matter, energy contained in matter and the cosmos. The rotundity of the sculpture in compact and forceful forms with studied ultimately random textures, dialogued with the sobriety of large-format engravings in black and white, shadow and cosmic memory of this garden of forceful terra cotta forms, faced at the same time to pieces of noucentista sculpture at the back of the gallery.

Art gallery award for the best exhibition. Mid-career artist category:

In the Palmadotze Gallery for Polka, by Sabine Finkenauer . For having been able to reconnect with the more lyrical side of the legacy of the historical avant-gardes of the 20th century, especially with the abstract and evocative work of Paul Klee, closely linked to nature, poetry and music, but also with the formal developments and chromatics by Robert and Sonia Delaunay. Finkenauer has succeeded in renewing and updating this creative line in a very personal way and from a female perspective, through paintings, drawings, sculptural objects and various plastic developments that lie between abstraction and figuration and come to unfold in form of expanded painting and installations that present variations on a theme. The recognition also values the work done by the Palmadotze gallery to offer, from its space in Vilafranca del Penedès, a program of high-quality contemporary art in various formats and styles.

Award to the art gallery for the best exhibition. Emerging artist category:

At the RocioSantaCruz Gallery for the exhibition 2B, by Andrés Torres . For a long career and a deep and rich mark in Barcelona and this year specifically for his exhibition 2B, To Be, by Andrés Torres, placed on the exhibition schedule of ArtsLibris Barcelona 2023 and Art Nou 2023 - Emerging Art Festival from Barcelona and Hospitalet. In the Exhibition, which unfolds around the gallery like a kind of nineteenth-century art gallery, Andrés Torres Rivas has given life to an individual imagination full of critical questions about the experience of living. The psychological analysis of each figure, isolated in a botany notebook logic that aims to study those who only exist in the intellect of Torres Rivas (and now in the one who thinks them), tries to understand the essential forms and aspects of each

Art Gallery Award for Best Historical Exhibition:

A|34 for Tàpies. itineraries For the rigor in the construction of a retrospective look at the work of the painter Antoni Tàpies, on the occasion of the celebration of his centenary, with a few well-chosen works from different moments and periods, which at a glance allowed us to grasp the dimension , cosmic, sacred and human creation of this artist. Each exhibited work showed a giant step from figurative beginnings, to an intense spiritual dimension of the period of Dau al Set, passing through material abstraction in a landscape, through the poverty of the object and through the return to more humanized presence in his painting in recent years.