2021
Luisa Cunha
Jury:
Benjamin Weil
José Manuel dos Santos
Miguel Coutinho
Philippe Vergne
Teresa Patrício Gouveia
Tobi Maier
Vera Pinto Pereira
Luisa Cunha has been chosen unanimously by the Jury of the 2021 edition of the EDP Foundation Art Grand Prize. The jury highlighted “the originality, experimental boldness, multidisciplinary and pioneering nature” of the artist’s use of new languages, while also emphasising how influential she has been to younger generations.
The Jury also underlined the way in which Luisa Cunha works with space and sound based on verbal language, in a permanent game of constructing and deconstructing meanings.
“Luisa Cunha’s work lies outside any generational categorisation, since she has inherited the dematerialisation experiences of international art in the 1970s. As this is an award given in recognition of her work, it will undoubtedly contribute to lending Luisa Cunha the public visibility that her artistic merit warrants,” the jury explained.
Biography
Luisa Cunha lives and works in Lisbon. She studied sculpture at Ar.Co, Lisbon’s Centre of Arts and Visual Communication. Her work is based on a very clear and emotional awareness of the relative nature of life itself and, therefore, of conventions, of the significant difference between internal and external, of private and public, of the fragmentary nature of the “non-place”, of power, of the dimensions of time and place, and of discourse.
This belief began with the practice that the artist developed early on and with the fact that she is used to observing without having a particular goal in mind, simply allowing things to come in, in a state of complete openness, without imposing borders or judgment (as much as possible). First finding things, and then searching for them.
