Jhonatan Pulido: Valerie Beston Award 2023

2023

SPACE is delighted to announce that Jhonatan Pulido is the recipient of the Valerie Beston Award 2023.

Jhonatan (b. 1988, Granada Meta, Colombia) is a Colombian painter based in London. He studied fine arts at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia between 2009 and 2014 and Painting at the Royal College of Art from 2017 to 2019. Drawing on his personal experiences and memories from growing up in rural Colombia, the artist creates artworks as an act of memory. His paintings reflect upon Colombian architecture, the traditions of rural communities, and the relations of these to socio-cultural conflict. Engaged in exploring pictorial decisions in contexts that come out of the conventions of art, Pulido seeks to reflect on the role this approach and its materiality performs in everyday contexts and historical grounds. His approach here is situated where value lies more in a negotiated functionality rather than advancing the idea of art for and in itself. His work places particular emphasis on components of popular Colombian architecture and the logic that it follows as inherited through history.
 
“My practice is a constant reconstruction of the memory, not only seen this as an act of remembering but as a changing process of the materials with which I create. I point out the importance of colour and the act of painting within the Colombian rural population, where the value of painting lies more in its functionality than in the very concept of art. I take formal components of Colombian villages’ architecture, and the logic it follows and has inherited throughout history, reflecting on the communities, their traditions, their relationship with decorative aesthetics, and different socio-cultural problems, such as armed conflict, exclusion, and poverty.”