Antequera,
The Antequera City National Painting Contest, organized by the Community of Owners of the town’s Industrial Estate and sponsored by the Unicaja Foundation and the Antequera City Council, has completed its twenty-eighth editions this year, distributing 7,500 euros in its various categories.
The artist from Jaén David Martínez Calderón has won with his work try to fit inwhile Gala Knörr from Alava won second prize with the painting Miracles Happen and Aida Mauri Crusat, with Church of Our Lady of Los Remedioshas won the Antequera Tematica special award.
Graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Granada, Martínez Calderón has been working on paintings and drawings of very varied subject matter (landscapes, portraits, interiors) in which we can glimpse his taste for the fragment, for non-places and for evoking fleeting stories, sometimes everyday stories of random individuals who evaporate into the air and who make us want to know. His award-winning piece has something of the human desire to assimilate into the group, in which half a dozen rows of leaves of similar size differ only in their tones, which do not completely break the uniformity. This Andalusian author states not only to try to understand the external environment or the most superficial layer of what is represented, but to try to raise questions and know if they can be answered.
Gala Knörr, for her part, focuses on the complex relationship between our identities and new technologies, current “social norms” and the ways of establishing contact that the Internet has generated, as well as the possible ways to reflect on these issues in lasting media, such as painting.
When he joined our roster, he explained to us: My work has always been related to the different subcultures that I discovered through literature, music or the media; I am interested in the social sphere, in some networks I have infiltrated in one way or another as an observer and other times as an active voice. One of the constants of my work is change; I usually create focusing on how identities are reformulated through the hyperconnectivity in which we live with the use of the Internet and the exponential growth of technology, or on our options when it comes to changing those social and cultural realities in contemporary narratives. I especially like to highlight the dysfunctions of language, the associative power of the image and the use of somewhat non-sense humor; I conceive all of this, in some way, as an act of resistance.
Finally, Aida Mauri, from Barcelona since 1991, paints especially ancient or classic architecture, attracted by the beauty left in them by the remains of centuries. He does so with marked perspectives and favoring depth, using usually soft tonal ranges, tending toward monochrome.
The jury in charge of selecting them was made up of Emilia Garrido Oliver, Jose Manuel Medina Galeote, Alejandro del Valle Cordero, Pedro Fernández Roales, David Sancho Paradas, Santiago Mejías Diaz, Ricardo Hidalgo Rodríguez and José Manuel Patricio Toro, who highlighted the chosen works’ use of an original language that draws on multiple influences, the established career of the artists and the expressive force of their images, which are generally nourished by a culture common contemporary audiovisual, interpreted in a personal way.
Last Friday the awards ceremony took place at the Pinacoteca Ciudad de Antequera, where the eighteen finalist and award-winning works can be seen until January 11, 2026. They have also been included in a digital catalog on the award website.
The objective of this call, already consolidated as a reference for painting competitions in Spain, is to promote the city of Antequera through the values of art, projecting an image of this Malaga town linked to cultural activity.
