By Emelia Viaña
The Madrid native has just been recognized with the 2024 Idealista Contemporary Art Award.
“It’s an opportunity for people to understand my career, my work as a whole.”
Diana Larrea loves Madrid, which is why she strolls, searches, and explores the best of a city with which she seeks to engage. She has just been recognized for this exploration of urban spaces with the 2024 Idealista Prize for Contemporary Art, and her project, Urban Interventions: Madrid, has been selected for the award. What impact will it have? "It's an opportunity for people to understand my career, my work as a whole," acknowledges Larrea, who maintains a personal commitment to certain symbolic conflicts, both contemporary and from the historical past, prompting reflections in citizens regarding public spaces.
The selection, curated by Elisa Hernando and coordinated by Arte Global, presents a series of video art works and documentary photographs of Larrea's interventions in different points of
Madrid, which will be added to the real estate marketplace's collection. The Public Case: Intruders project is one of them, in which Larrea challenges the perception of space by placing human barriers in the street, forcing pedestrians to change their paths. Also, Public Case: Blue Zone, where the artist transforms urban space and covers parked vehicles with blue covers, questioning the aesthetic order of the city. Another project is Distinguished Streets, where Larrea highlights the abandonment of Lavapiés. And finally, Let's fall in LOVE!, an urban intervention located on the elevated viaduct over Segovia Street, one of the locations chosen by suicide bombers to jump into their void.
Larrea laments that her work and that of her contemporaries are sometimes judged without historical references. “There's a kind of suspicion about contemporary art. It's surprising that, given Spain's artistic heritage, some of its expressions are so misunderstood. The art of today is the art of the future, and that's how it should be judged; it's a language, and if you're not familiar with it, it's incomprehensible. It's like trying to understand Japanese without having taken a single class. There's very little artistic culture, and most people just enjoy classical art,” says the Madrid-based artist, who feels privileged to be able to earn a living doing what she loves most. “Most of my colleagues have other jobs to earn a living, and art is something they enjoy, but it doesn't provide enough to eat. It's a very precarious environment for artists, but also for curators and managers,” concludes Larrea.
