The Ankaria Foundation’s Artist Book Award, established over a decade ago, has become an international benchmark in the editorial and artistic fields. With participation this year from 181 artists and authors from 26 countries, the award not only stands out for its global reach but also for the cultural diversity reflected in the submitted projects. This geographic breadth emphasizes the inclusive nature of the competition, featuring works from countries as diverse as Japan, Brazil, Germany, and Venezuela.
At its core, the Ankaria Award celebrates the artist book as both an artistic object and a transformative vehicle for contemporary editorial ideas. The competition gathers creators and thinkers whose work transcends conventional boundaries, exploring new visual and conceptual possibilities. This underlines the significance of the artist book as a dynamic medium, one that in the hands of these authors becomes a powerful tool for critical and aesthetic reflection.
The importance of this award lies in its ability to foster creation, stimulate international dialogue, and position artist books as key pieces in the contemporary art circuit. This year’s volume of submissions and the diverse origins of the artists not only confirm the strength of the competition but also elevate its status as a global platform for the recognition of new voices in the field of editorial art.
FIRST PRIZE
Pedro Torres
Roma
Pedro Torres offers us in Roma a work that explores time and space through a minimalist and deeply conceptual proposal. Inspired by his residency in Rome, the piece uses the city’s cobblestone streets as a metaphor for the temporal and spatial stratification of the urban landscape. The use of graph paper and carefully placed holes—one for each day of his stay—creates a network of visible and invisible layers, evoking the complexity of the eternal city. This work becomes a poetic walk where the experience of strolling translates into a tactile and visual reading that, like Rome itself, reveals more than what appears at first glance. The box that houses the book adds a sculptural dimension, emphasizing the solidity and, at the same time, the fragility of time, history, and the personal.
SECOND PRIZE
Pedro Luis Cembranos
Páginas Amarillas
With Páginas Amarillas, Pedro Luis Cembranos invites us to reflect on repetition, copying, and the materiality of the book as a sculptural object. By repurposing the iconic telephone directories, the artist establishes a dialogue between the serial and the unique, reinterpreting the Roman sculptural tradition, renowned for its practice of replicating Greek art. Cembranos transforms this obsolete material into a polished and lacquered sculpture, highlighting the tension between originality and reproduction in art. The use of alabaster and adhesive paper serves as a metaphor for the transformation of printed media into art objects, exploring identity and territory through memory and repetition. The work connects with an industrial and cultural past while questioning the relevance of multiple editions in contemporary art.
JAVIER ROSÓN YOUNG ARTIST AWARD
Alejandra Espinosa
Ma mère et moi
At just 22 years old, Alejandra Espinosa presents Ma mère et moi, a delicate and evocative work that revolves around the construction of family memory. Using found photographs from an unknown family album, Espinosa reinterprets the relationship between mother and daughter through superimpositions and transparencies, creating a new narrative that oscillates between the personal and the fictional. The choice of Japanese paper and the exposed binding reinforce the fragility and transparency of memories. Through this work, the young artist speaks to us about the relationship between the public and the private, how family images can take on new meanings when displaced from their original context, making Ma mère et moi a powerful exercise in visual and emotional introspection.