The Barcelona artist Teresa Lanceta (1951) is the winner of the 2023 National Prize for Plastic Arts organized by the Ministry of Culture and Sports in recognition of her entire career. The award jury has highlighted in its ruling that “to award Teresa Lanceta is to recognize a generation of women, the technique of weaving as a language” as well as “an artistic practice sustained over time that rescues a feminine, vernacular and collective (…), a primordial code of humanity far from the patriarchal through which it has come into contact with the cultures of various groups such as the Roma population, the Moroccan nomadic weavers or the residents of the Raval”.
Lanceta, doctor in History and professor at the Alicante School of Architecture, has been working since the 70s on fabrics as an expressive language, with borderline results between art and crafts. I border the boundary between crafts, art, anthropological research and art theory. According to the note sent by the Ministry of Culture, the artist has linked her work to popular textile art in Morocco, to the tradition of the 15th century Spanish carpet and to the work of women in the old tobacco industry. His works have participated in exhibitions organized by national and international institutions such as MACBA, IVAM, MUSAC, the Spanish Academy in Rome, the 57th Venice Biennale, the 11th Cairo Biennale, or the Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum. .
«It is a very slow and repetitive technique. It’s like yoga, hypnotic. And in a world like mine, which is not exciting or anything, knitting is reaching nirvana,” Lanceta said in a recent interview published by EL MUNDO. [I start from] «the idea and the color, but I can change them. Suddenly you get tired and do something else. And if I’m wrong, it’s okay, because that will lead me to something else. Like mistakes in life, you have to accept them and move forward… I wouldn’t mind if [my works] were used as blankets. In the face of a cataclysm, they would be useful. Why not?”.