February, 2020. On February 22nd, the Otazu Foundation will celebrate the IV edition of Art Weekend, an event where art and wine merge. This event, part of the international program of ARCOmadrid 2020, brings together art, wine, nature and history with the premise of artistic creation as a tool for reflection, innovation and social improvement. The central moment of ArtWeekend4 will be the presentation of the winning work of the 2019 Monumental Sculpture Biennial Award, which in this edition has gone to Hans-Peter Feldmann (Düsseldorf, Germany, 1941). It is the German artist’s first monumental piece in Spain and his proposal has been chosen by an international jury chaired by Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid.
The winning work, entitled Time, relates the value and transcendence of this essential element in everyday life. But also in nature and the vineyard. Time as a space of the unpredictable. “Man has often tried to describe time, to control it, to understand its meaning and to interpret it. However, every attempt to stop or speed up time has proved an absolutely impossible task,” explains Hans-Peter Feldmann in his proposal for the Otazu Foundation.
In this case, Time takes the form of a stainless steel clock with a diameter of more than three meters, with both faces visible, inserted 50 centimeters below the ground and inclined. The work provokes a profound sense of strangeness in the viewer and, at the same time, challenges the viewer to reflect. Hans-Peter Feldmann is one of the great European conceptual artists and his universe is everyday life. His work is part, among others, of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), the Tate in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Reina Sofia Museum (Madrid).
ArtWeekend4 will also present all the projects carried out by the Otazu Foundation that link art and wine. These are Artist Series, by Alfredo Jaar, winner of the first edition of the Biennial Prize for Monumental Sculpture; Genios de Otazu #2 with Pablo Armesto, who frames his work within a context that goes from geometric abstraction to the most contemporary sculpture and the proposal “1 hectare/1 history”, based on the photographic and audiovisual works of Jordi Bernadó. In addition, Vitral de Otazu, the posthumous work of Carlos Cruz-Díez, will be presented. It is a proposal that fuses wine with contemporary art. The final piece of this project, a milestone for the Otazu Winery, will see the light of day in 2042, 30 years after its conception.
Another novelty will be the exhibition curated by Miguel López-Remiro, a professional from the world of museums and art direction. This exhibition is a tribute to Elena Asins, as a reminder of the significance of this land of Navarre in her work and all she did for its people, and focuses on her final artistic stage, especially her artistic research of Sophocles’ Antigone. The exhibition includes works on loan from the Reina Sofia Museum, a private collection and pieces from the Otazu Foundation Collection.
ArtWeekend4 attendees will have the opportunity to tour the Señorío de Otazu, a 12th century medieval village, and visit the monumental works of Manolo Valdés, Xavier Mascaró, Baltasar Lobo, Jim Dine and Leandro Erlich. At the same time, the winning works of previous editions of the Otazu Foundation’s Monumental Sculpture Biennial Award will be on view: El color de nuestras vidas (2015), by Chilean Alfredo Jaar and Crudo Zarzo (2017), by Spanish artist Asier Mendizabal.