News
Blanca Gracia wins the 2025 Art Nou Award
Artist Blanca Gracia wins the 2025 Art Nou Award with an exhibition.
Art Nou is ending its 14th edition, consolidating itself as the major event for emerging art in Catalonia and Spain. During this summer, almost sixty artists under the age of 35 have presented work in more than thirty exhibition spaces in Barcelona and L'Hospitalet. The festival has offered a program of 32 exhibitions and more than forty parallel activities, where national and international creators linked to the Catalan context have shown innovative proposals, many of them unprecedented. The sustained increase in audience in each edition confirms Art Nou as a privileged showcase for discovering new voices in the art scene.
The Art Nou 2025 Award, awarded by La Capella, has been given to the Madrid artist Blanca Gracia (1989), recognized for the exhibition Mala hierba nunca muere , presented at the Nogueras Blanchard gallery. The project combines watercolor and sculpture to reflect on language and its capacity to dominate, inspired by scientific drawings from the 17th century. Gracia recovers expressions historically used in a pejorative way against dissident bodies and subjects to claim a space where what is rejected reappears with greater force. The metaphor is clear: the more the weed is pulled out, the more persistent and vigorous it grows.
The closing ceremony, held at La Capella, featured the performance Parafonías by Blanca Tolsà Rovira , with the collaboration of Pepe Lolo, Berta Pascu and Rodrigo Rammey. The proposal, located between dance, sound and sensory experimentation, explored how the body and voice can move and transform to generate a space where meanings are distorted and reconfigured, opening the door to new forms of perception.
As usual, several cultural institutions have this year strengthened their link with Art Nou and their support for emerging Catalan art through different awards and professional recognitions. The Art-o-rama Award has been awarded to the Chiquita Room gallery for the exhibition De la sang al foc by María Freire Montané. This distinction, which consolidates five consecutive years of collaboration between Art Nou and the Marseille fair, will allow the gallery to participate in the 2026 edition of Art-o-rama with the stand entirely taken over by the organization.
'Mala hierba nunca muere' by Blanca Gracia © Roberto Ruiz · Prats Nogueras Blanchard.
On the other hand, this year the first edition of the SWAB-Art Nou Award was held, awarded to the Dilalica gallery for the exhibition by Mikel Adán Tolosa, Mi voz en su dedo más pequeñito . The jury of the fair highlighted the risk and quality of a proposal that conceives the sculptural element as a meeting point between bodies. Thanks to the award, the gallery will have its own stand at the SWAB 2025 Fair, where the artist's work can be presented.
