The artist Carla Filipe is the winner of the FLAD Drawing Award 2023 – an initiative of FLAD, in partnership with Drawing Room Lisboa -, and will receive a monetary prize of 20 thousand euros. Carla Filipe was chosen for the exemplary quality of her drawing practice, which the jury says can be considered “a contemporary landmark of drawing in Portugal”.

The announcement was made this Saturday by the President of FLAD, Rita Faden, at the National Society of Fine Arts in Lisbon, where Drawing Room Lisboa, a contemporary art fair dedicated to drawing, is taking place until October 29.

“The FLAD Drawing Award is already a consolidated project, which demonstrates FLAD’s commitment to supporting the arts and artists in Portugal. Many congratulations to Carla Filipe, for her excellent work in Drawing, such a varied and interesting artistic form, and so present in FLAD’s Art Collection. And congratulations to all the finalists, who presented us with proposals of great quality and creativity.” – Rita Faden, President of FLAD.

Carla Filipe wins the third edition of this award with an artistic production considered remarkable for the uniqueness, singularity and breadth of her work, by the jury, a work of great breath and consistency that unfolds in some basic concepts of drawing: the graphics, the line, the word, the image.

“The artist uses her work with line to create unique spatial installations, manipulating with evocative intelligence the precepts of the plot and the entanglement that combines with the idea of multiplying the drawing page”, according to Ângela Ferreira, member of the jury of the FLAD Drawing Award 2023. “It should also be noted the combination of abstraction and representation to communicate its message and concepts of public and political content. However, never letting her ability to create new images be subverted by pamphleteer political activism. Her drawing practice is truly expansive and can be considered a contemporary landmark of drawing in Portugal.” – Ângela Ferreira, artist, chaired the jury.

The winner of the 2023 edition of the FLAD Drawing Award was announced this Saturday at Drawing Room Lisboa, a fair that is once again associated with the realization of this initiative and works by the 10 finalists of this edition of the award are on display.

The FLAD Drawing Award, worth €20,000, was delivered by the president of FLAD, Rita Faden, was awarded in what is the 6th edition of Drawing Room Lisboa, after More than 200 applications and 10 finalist artists selected: António Poppe, Carla Filipe, Cristina Lamas, Dayana Lucas, Hugo Canoilas, Joanna Latka, Manuel Caldeira, Marco Franco, Paulo Brighenti and Pedro Valdez Cardoso.

The FLAD Drawing Award is already a consolidated project, and an important part of a wide range of initiatives and programs that the Foundation has developed to support the arts in Portugal. The choice of design as an artistic form to be promoted with this initiative is framed with the importance of drawing in the Foundation’s private collection of contemporary art.

In the first two editions, the artists distinguished with the Prize were Pedro Tropa and Maria Capelo.

About the winner

Carla Filipe was born in 1973 in Vila Nova da Barquinha, and works in Porto. She is a multidisciplinary artist, author of a work that critically explores the relationship between art objects, popular culture and activism. Anchored in drawing, in personal experiences and in a sense of autobiography as an experimental archive of contemporaneity, her creative process results from the appropriation of artefacts and documents with which her own form of social portrait and, simultaneously, of self-portrait is constructed.

She held the solo exhibitions “In My own Language I am Independent“, at the Serralves Museum, 2023, “Tomorrow there is no art”at Maat in 2019 “From Tail to Head”, Museu Berardo, in 2014, and was part of the group exhibitions “Living Uncertainty:” at the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, in 2016, “Mom, Am I Barbarian?” at the 13th Istanbul Biennial in 2013.