This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Artist Eva Lootz in front of her work for the first edition of CNIO Arte, in 2018. /Amparo Garrido. CNIO.
- CNIO ARTE is the initiative launched five years ago by the CNIO to promote art and science, as well as the relationship between both disciplines.
- Artists Eva Lootz, Chema Madoz, Carmen Calvo, Daniel Canogar and Susana Solano have collaborated, respectively, with Margarita Salas (who passed away in 2019); quantum physicist Ignacio Cirac; paleoanthropologist Juan Luis Arsuaga; computational biologist Sarah Teichmann; and epidemiologist Pedro Alonso.
- A selection of works from CNIO ARTE will be exhibited at the Cervantes Institute in New York from February 2 to April 15.
In her works created for CNIO ARTE, Eva Lootz reflects on the origins of molecular biology and genetic manipulation; Chema Madoz refers to the role of chance, inspired by quantum physics; Carmen Calvo fractures memories, as perhaps those still present in the hominid skulls found in Atapuerca; Daniel Canogar is inspired by the big data of life; Susana Solano encourages reflection on the relationship (or non-relationship) between Europe and Africa. Art and science produce universal ideas and knowledge, and this principle drives the leap of CNIO ARTE to New York.
CNIO ARTE is the pioneering initiative launched five years ago by CNIO (Spanish National Cancer Research Center), with the support of the Banco Santander Foundation, to promote the relationship between art and science. Every year since 2018 CNIO ARTE puts leading international scientists and artists in contact, so that the creators can create a work inspired by science. Artist Amparo Garrido has been the curator of CNIO ARTE, and Maria Blasco, also CNIO’s scientific director, the executive director.
Throughout five editions of CNIO ARTE, artists Eva Lootz; Chema Madoz; Carmen Calvo; Daniel Canogar; and Susana Solano have worked respectively with biochemist Margarita Salas (who passed away in 2019); quantum physicist Ignacio Cirac; paleoanthropologist Juan Luis Arsuaga; computational biologist Sarah Teichmann; and epidemiologist Pedro Alonso. A selection of the resulting works will be exhibited at the Instituto Cervantes in New York from February 2 to April 15, in a joint exhibition organized by the Cervantes Institute, CNIO and the Banco Santander Foundation.
The director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero, strongly defends the art-science binomial. In the catalog of the exhibition in New York he writes: “When they come together, the arts and sciences come closer than ever to it [the truth]. The truth, the shiver that enlightens and returns us to the path of being better human beings, always combining, as the poet wanted, beauty and truth”.
Maria A. Blasco, director of CNIO ARTE, puts it this way: “Scientists and artists have always faced the unknown, the darkness, and we have not been afraid to enter it, with an open mind, in order to see beyond it. Both art and science need creativity, freedom, reflection, curiosity. At CNIO these ingredients combine to give rise to the best science, and we wanted to create the conditions for art to be generated as well. The great themes of the 21st century in one way or another involve science, and could be the inspiration for great art. Susan Sontag already wrote in her diaries “Every month we could have a new art movement, just by reading Scientific American”.
For Rodrigo Echenique Gordillo, president of Fundación Banco Santander, the exhibition “allows us to enjoy a selection of the works created for the CNIO ARTE program, an initiative that seeks to establish connections between scientists and renowned artists, and which was born with a fundamental principle: both science and art are essential to understand and interpret the world, and both can inspire each other and dialogue”.