THE SCULPTURE SYMPOSIUM OF UTEBO

Abstract

The town of Utebo, located a few kilometers from Saragossa, has became in the last years, a true cultural and artistic boiling point. Within the extensive cultural agenda that is offered in Utebo through the year, it is possible to emphasize, in the summer period, the Sculpture Symposium that comes celebrating since 2004.

This artistic experience of great importance not only in Aragon, but also in all Spain and rest of the world started up with
four objectives:
- To approach the process of artistic creation to citizens.
- To set the conditions for future sculpture workshops.
- To extend the artistic patrimony of the municipality.
- To embellish certain zones of the urban surroundings.

With these previous intentions, the Area of Culture began to promote this spectacle of “live stone sculpture” for which a quite generous budget was destined considering the possibilities of the Town hall, a sum that has increased in these four years from the
21,000 Euros in the first one to the 24,000, spent this 2007. Although in the first edition the four participant artists were invited by his recognised prestige, in the rest of simposia the selection of the projects has been realised through a public call that is year after year an excellent success, because of the number of received proposals and its quality and the variety of places from which they come.

During the fifteen days that the event lasts, a new artistic space is created outdoors, in which four artists works in public and, simultaneously, have the opportunity to solve doubts of the people who observe all the process. Throughout these four editions, fourteen sculptors have participated and left their signature in other many sculptures that thicken the considerable municipal artistic patrimony. Thanks to them, the town becomes a small sample of the present artistic panorama in which that eclecticism is present, that confluence of multiple tendencies that is what characterises our time:
figuration, abstraction, symbolism, conceptualism…

To walk by the parks, places and streets of Utebo turns out to be the same experience that appreciated when crossing the rooms of a museum of contemporary art, but with remarkable differences: the works are in open spaces, its perception is never the same because it changes during the day and over the years, and are admired by a more numerous public than in any museum.