Francesc Torres (Barcelona, 76 years old) has been awarded the 2024 Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts, worth 100,000 euros. The jury highlighted “his artistic career with interdisciplinary work and a precursor of conceptual art that encompasses various media such as sculpture, installation, video art and photography. The work of Francesc Torres is characterized by its deep reflection on the social and political context. Throughout his career, with international projection, Torres has addressed essential issues in our time such as war, identity, historical memory and the impact of the media on the perception of the world, exploring the intersections between art and politics. ”. Likewise, the jury noted that Francesc Torres “is also recognized for his commitment to teaching, having been a professor in various academic institutions and contributing to the development of new generations of artists.”
Francesc Torres is one of the most international and recognized Spanish creators, a pioneer of video art and multimedia installation. In addition to multiple museums in Spain, he has held exhibitions in places such as the National Galerie in Berlin, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York or the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
He was the artist who was allowed to work with the material remains recovered from Ground Zero of the Twin Towers. An exhibition titled The fragmented memory of 9/11 NY. Artifacts in hangar 17, a photographic project with the images captured by the artist in the warehouse at Kennedy Airport where the remains of the attacks were stored: from gigantic twisted beams to a child’s sock. Torres obtained permits from the Port Authority of New York to enter the site, and spent five weeks there photographing the remains of the tragedy with his eyes. The result of his work could be seen, in 2011, in four exhibitions: in Barcelona, Madrid, London and New York. These last three, the Western cities victims of radical Islamic terrorism then.
The Catalan was also the author of the impressive installation in 2021 Indoor aeronautics (flight) at the National Museum of Art of Catalonia (MNAC), which featured a republican bomber from the Civil War in the shape of a cross suspended from the ceiling of the museum’s Oval Room. Of that work Torres said: “We therefore have an iconography of the crucifixion and what we are talking about is a ritualized sacrifice: the sacrifice of faith in the case of the saint. If you expand the concept to the maximum, we arrive at the great sacrificial ritual that is war.”
In November 2023 he presented the work titled Welcome evil. Created specifically for the place, where it appears as the prologue to the temporary exhibition Why, war?is an invitation to reflect on the war experience by an artist in whose production war, weapons, technology, automobiles and military machinery have had a relevant place.
Francesc Torres has also been recognized with the National Prize for Fine Arts in 1991 and during the course of 2009, with the National Prize for Visual Arts, both awarded by the Generalitat of Catalonia.