Eluska Zabalo wins the Nautilus Lanzarote Prize

Septembre 17, 2018

Nautilus Lanzarote has chosen Eluska Zabalo for a two-week artist residency in Lanzarote (Canary Islands) next year, in the context of its partnership with the Itzal Aktiboa Prize for young artists in the Basque Country.

Nautilus Lanzarote runs an apartment hotel complex in Lanzarote committed to ensuring accessibility for handicapped visitors, protection of the environment and promotion of artistic creativity. It demonstrates its commitment to art by organising artistic residencies that have welcomed around 15 artists each year for the past 10 years. This is the fourth time that Nautilus Lanzarote has given its support to the competition for the Itzal aktiboa prize.

In her submission for the competition, Eluska Zabalo presented a 130 cm x 143 cm painting with collage on wood as part of her series of "Erratic Landscapes".

Born in San Sebastián in 1982, Eluska embarked at an early age on her career as an artist, attending courses in the workshops of different painters and then studying at the School of Fine Arts in Pamplona. She has a degree in Fine Arts and Sociology from the University of the Basque Country (EHU-UPV) and she lives and works in Arrasate-Mondragon, combining her artistic activities with painting classes for adults and children.

Over the last two decades, her painterly language has evolved from constructivist-style expressionism to a form of abstract figuration. In taking a biomorphic approach involving a combination of both vegetal and mineral elements, she has adopted the landscape as a reference base and a source of formalist potential. As she herself explains, her approach to landscape is less concerned with the representation of nature as a source of organic forms than with its potential as a motif that is formalist rather than thematic in nature. For this reason, she often says that she paints non-landscapes. In essence, her "Erratic Landscapes" offer an opportunity to experience this process live through form and colour.