CAMILO ONTIVEROS WINS 2010 ILLY PRIZE

Camilo Ontiveros has won the 2010 Illy Prize at ARCOmadrid, the contemporary art fair that closed yesterday in Spain, reports Christopher Knight for the Los Angeles Times. Designed for artists under thirty-five participating in the special section “Panorama: Los Angeles,” the prize includes an award of about twenty thousand dollars. Seventeen artists from twelve galleries participating in ARCO’s special section were considered for the prize.

As at ARCO, Ontiveros’s solo debut last summer at Steve Turner Contemporary featured salvaged washing machines that had been carefully restored and painted in pristine hues at a local auto-body shop. The work mixes a variety of sculpture and painting traditions, as well as functional and conceptual value systems.

Jurors Kris Kuramitsu and Christopher Miles, independent curators from LA, and Carlo Bach, artistic director of the Italian coffee company Illycaffe, told the audience at Friday’s announcement: “For this award, we chose . . . an artist whose practice we believe embodies the experimental spirit that often has driven some of the most compelling work to have come out of Los Angeles, and that has defined the era in which Los Angeles has come of age as a cultural capital. [Ontiveros’s] work touches upon a complex range of genres and concerns, from immigration and urban economies to process art, Minimalism, and finish fetish.”