• From July 11-21, Gallagher and Cleijne will lead a cyanotype workshop in which the participating artists will learn the techniques of this fascinating 19th-century photographic process and use it to create collaborative 16mm film sequences.
• Over the 10 days of living and working together, the participants will explore the Bay of Santander and the Cantabrian Sea as history, as site, and as material.  
• The closing date for the reception of applications will be June 19, 2022, and the two artists running the workshop will themselves select the 10 chosen participants, whose names will be posted on the website of the Fundación Botín from June 27.

The internationally acclaimed North American artist Ellen Gallagher will lead the forthcoming Botín Foundation Visual Arts Workshop in conjunction with the Dutch artist Edgar Cleijne.

This workshop runs parallel to Centro Botin´s current exhibition Ellen Gallagher with Edgar Cleijne: A law… a blueprint… a scale, the first presentation in Spain by the American artist including paintings, works on paper as well as three film installations created in collaboration with Dutch artist Edgar Cleijne. Curated by Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, Centro Botín’s Director of Exhibitions and the Collection, and Benjamin Weil, Director of the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian’s centre for modern art, the exhibition proposes an active dialogue with the deep-sea waters and the organisms, stories and myths that inhabit them.

The previous Fundación Botín Visual Arts Workshop was held in 2019, just before the Covid-19 pandemic, having been run in Santander since 1994. The annual tradition is making a welcome return with this new workshop, which will take place from July 11 to 21, in which the participating artists will explore the techniques and the creative possibilities of the cyanotype, one of the oldest photographic printing processes still in use today, dating from the middle of the 19th century, to compose collaborative 16mm film sequences.

A maximum of 10 artists will be personally selected by Gallagher and Cleijne to take part in this unique experience, a workshop that will invite them to immerse themselves in the Bay of Santander and explore the Cantabrian Sea as history, place and material. A key principle of these 10 days of living and working together, entirely in English, is that the participants are open to collaborative processes of working and creating. Sunday, June 19, 2022, is the closing date for application, which must be in digital format, by way of www.fundacionbotin.org and www.centrobotin.org, where the conditions of eligibility are already available for consultation. The names of the artists chosen by the workshop directors will be published online from June 27, 2022. The Fundación Botín will cover the participants’ per diem expenses and will also provide accommodation for those not resident in Cantabria.

For almost 30 years now, the Fundación Botín Visual Arts Workshops have brought together young artists in Santander to share work and experiences with outstanding creative talents of the calibre of Carsten Höller, Juan Uslé, Gabriel Orozco, Julião Sarmento, Miroslaw Balka, Antoni Muntadas, Jannis Kounellis, Mona Hatoum, Paul Graham, Tacita Dean, Carlos Garaicoa, Julie Mehretu, Joan Jonas, Cristina Iglesias and Martin Creed.

About Ellen Gallagher

Providence, Rhode Island, USA, 1965

Encompassing painting, drawing, collage and celluloid based projections that fuse technique and material into syncretic form, her arresting compositions are a process of recovery and reconstitution through the accumulation and erasure of media, which results in palimpsestic and topographic surfaces that are often carved, inlaid, mounted, printed, blotted and inscribed. Gallagher’s work is included in many major international museum collections including MoMA, New York; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; MCA Chicago; MOCA, Los Angeles; Philadelphia Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of Art, New York; and Tate, London.

About Edgar Cleijne

Eindhoven, Netherlands, 1963

He graduated from the Rotterdam Conservatory in 1990. His photography and film practice is focused on large-scale interventions in the urban landscape enforced by negotiations between the individual and the state. Concentrating on the individual choices that result in complex urban developments, Cleijne portrays the struggle to live and be represented within systems of official denial. Merging the opposite ends of traditional and digital imaging, Cleijne looks at the effects of the Anthropocene in the crossing points of nature, culture and commons. This position is reflected in his filmic installations by creating an interweaving of space, image and sound.