Fina Miralles has been awarded the 2025 National Plastic Arts Award, at the proposal of the jury gathered on Monday. The award, awarded by the Ministry of Culture, is endowed with 30,000 euros.
The jury has highlighted the artist for “her pioneer role since the seventies in the framework of feminism and early environmental positions, claiming the relationship of the human being with nature.”
Life and Fine Miralles (Sabadell, 75 years) addresses these issues such as feminism, nature, power, art, through actions performic always starring herself, with the help of photography, painting and video and collage. One of the best examples of this legacy is the piece Zoo images, The photographs that came out of their confinement for three days in a cage. It was the year 1974 and the artist got with a dog, a lamb, a cat and a frog (each in her cage) in the installation he created for the Vinçon room, at that time, one of the few spaces in Barcelona that offered contemporary art.
The work was completed with a frieze of photographs of the Barcelona Zoo surrounding the room. “I wanted to protest what people saw normal, but it seemed like a barbarity; that the animals were in cages in poor condition. I suppose it will have changed. Have you gone recently,” he explained in an interview in the country, in 2020, the year in which the Macba dedicated the great retrospective Fina Miralles. I am all that I have been.
By then he had already moved to Cadaqués, although his formation began in Barcelona, to later spend long seasons in Latin America, France and Italy.
His artistic practice is usually linked to land art and the relations between body and nature. Miralles diluted the boundaries between trends and labels to such an extent that in 1973 it became a WOMAN-ANBOL when he planted in the middle of the field and buried his legs on earth.
Therefore, the jury has pointed out that “his work has a very powerful iconicity that prolongs its validity until now. Carry out an acute critical reflection of power in all its aspects. In recent years he has made a deep textual reflection in which he addresses the human experience adopting a holistic perspective.”
Miralles had already made clear his break with traditional art with his first work: Still life (1972) in which he prepares an unstructured landscape in which he places on a table shells, water, grass, stones, leaves, earth and algae that the viewer has to visualize as the still lodge of a picture.
From the 1980s, explore the matrician through the use of painting and drawing. Projects like Double (1979-1981) shows the symbiosis between performative and pictorial practice. A path that will lead you to a progressively more introspective creation.
With the change of the century it retires to Cadaqués, where it will continue working on those known as Photoation. Among its most relevant exhibitions and interventions stand out Of the life to life (Sabadell Museum, 2001), La BELIEVE of the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona (2014) Natural Naturals 1973-2016 (National Archaeological Museum, 2016). His entire file was deposited years ago at the Sabadell Museum of Art.