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The Cervantes Institute in Chicago (USA) will host from October 25th the exhibition Dialogues between Art and Science, which offers a selection of works by contemporary Spanish artists, all of them based on researchers by international scientists leaders in their fields.
These works were created within the framework of CNIO Arte, an initiative of the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO), with support of the Banco Santander Foundation, to promote the relationship between art and science.
In the different annual editions since 2018, artists Eva Lootz; Chema Madoz; Carmen Calvo; Daniel Canogar; Susana Solano and Amparo Garrido have worked respectively with biochemist Margarita Salas; quantum physicist Ignacio Cirac; paleoanthropologist Juan Luis Arsuaga; computational biologist Sarah Teichmann; epidemiologist Pedro Alonso; and biologist, Nobel Laureate in Medicine or Physiology, Elizabeth Blackburn.
The resulting works have been exhibited at the contemporary art fair ARCO Madrid and in other galleries, as well as at the CNIO itself.
Dialogues between art and science was first exhibited at a Cervantes Institute in New York at the beginning of 2023. Later, it could be seen at the Spanish Embassy in the U.S., in Washington, and from there it has travelled to the Cervantes Institute in Chicago, where it can be visited from its opening on October 25 until January 25th, 2024.
“Both science and art are essential to understand the world”
The CNIO Arte project is based on a fundamental principle: both science and art are essential to understand the world, and both can inspire each other. As Maria A. Blasco, director of the CNIO and executive director of CNIO Arte, points out: “Scientists and artists have always faced the unknown, the darkness, and we have not been afraid to enter into it, with an open mind, in order to learn, to see beyond it”.
The director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero, writes in the exhibition catalog: “When they come together arts and sciences come closer than ever to it [the truth]. The truth, that shiver that illuminates and brings us back to the path that makes us better human beings, by always combining, as the poet wanted, beauty and truth”.
CNIO Arte is one of the main outreach activities of the Spanish National Cancer Research Center, which has also established the philanthropic initiative Friends of the CNIO, to allow any person or institution that wishes to do so to contribute with their donations to the improvement of prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer. The sale of some of CNIO Arte’s works, as well as the donations related to this activity, are allocated to the CNIO Friends initiative.