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The Madrid native has just been awarded the 2024 Idealista Contemporary Art Prize
“It is an opportunity for people to understand my career, my work as a whole”
Diana Larrea likes Madrid, which is why she walks, searches, and tracks down the best of a city with which she tries to engage in dialogue. Now she has just been recognized for this exploration of urban spaces with the idealista Prize for Contemporary Art 2024 and her project Urban Interventions: Madrid has been selected for the award. What impact will it have? “It is an opportunity for my career, my work as a whole, to be understood,” acknowledges Larrea, who maintains a personal commitment to certain symbolic conflicts, both contemporary and from the historical past, creating 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 at different points of
Madrid, which will be incorporated into the collection of the real estate marketplace. The project Caso Público: Intrusos, is one of them, in which Larrea challenges the perception of space by placing human barriers in the middle of the street, forcing pedestrians to change their route. Also, Caso público: Zona azul, where the artist transforms the urban space and covers parked vehicles with blue covers, questioning the aesthetic order of the city. On the other hand, Calles mostrabas, where Larrea points out the abandonment of Lavapiés. And finally, Let's fall in LOVE!, an urban intervention located on the elevated viaduct built over Calle Segovia, one of the places chosen by suicides to jump into the void.
Larrea regrets that sometimes her work and that of her contemporaries is judged without historical references. “There is a kind of suspicion about contemporary art. It is surprising that with the artistic heritage that Spain has, some expressions of it are so poorly understood. The art of today is the art of the future and that is how it must be judged; it is a language and if you are not familiar with it, you cannot understand it. It is like trying to understand Japanese without having taken a single class. There is very little artistic culture and most people limit themselves to enjoying classical art,” says the artist from Madrid, who feels privileged to be able to earn a living doing what she likes most. “Most of my colleagues have other jobs to earn a living and art is something they enjoy, but it does not give them enough to eat. It is a very precarious environment for artists, but also for curators and managers,” concludes Larrea.