Dates: from 30 October 2008 to 11 January 2009.

     Place: Botín Foundation Exhibition Room.

     Exhibition curator: Christopher Phillips.

The title of this exhibition showed us Antoni Muntadas´ latest reflection on one of this questions: space and situations created in everyday environments. The exhibition invited us to reflect on space and situations created in everyday environments. The works, mostly photographic works and video screenings, together with new productions, were notes on the artist´s own biography, travel sketches, a reflection of his trips, places he visits and becomes involved with. The Foundation organised this exhibition to display the work of the Villa Iris Workshop Director in 2008. The workshop´s subject of reflection were actions in the Santander urban area.

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     Dates: from 15 June to 14 September 2008.

     Place: Botín Foundation Exhibition Room.

     Exhibition curator: Olivier Berggruen.

This exhibition on the American artist was possible thanks to the Botín Foundation´s collaboration in Santander and the Fondazione Memmo de Roma, and was an opportunity to display the works of this brilliant artist provided by institutions and individuals across the United States and Europe. Basquiat was born in New York in 1960 and is the first creator to make the leap to mainstream art from graffiti. Basquiat´s work is full of characters, snippets of text and figurative elements, with a composition full of rhythm and allusions to historical works of art.

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     Dates: from 31 July to 21 September 2008.

     Place: Villa Iris.

     Exhibition curator: Iria Candela.

Group project where the Botín Foundation once again chose one of the Visual Arts scholars to provide a forum for their current work. Low key summarises aestheticss resulting from a lack of resources (material, technical, human,...), with in many cases pre-technological and manual production processes (where it is easy to identify the manufacturing process and materials in it), bearing individual discourses or minority narratives. The following artists were initially selected to form part of this group exhibition: Santiago Borja, Tere Recarens, Hideaki Idetsuki, Mateo Maté, Santiago Ruiz de Infante, Jordi Colomer, Daniel Chust, Santiago Mayo, Jesús Palomino,  Carlos Bunga, Joana Cera, Tomás Ochoa and Fernando Renes.

     Dates: from 17 April to 15 June 2008.

     Place: Botín Foundation Exhibition Room.

     Exhibition curators: Benito Navarrete and Fuensanta García de la Torre.

This was the second exhibition on drawing as part of the Foundation´s line of research on the work of Spain´s great artists since the 17th century. It consisted of 73 drawings by Antonio del Castillo (1616-1668), giving us an appreciation of the artist´s career. The exhibition included Estudios de ocho cabezas masculinas (Studies of eight male heads) produced in 1642 when he was 26 years old, the artist´s first drawing preserved at the Museum of Fine Arts in Cordoba. Antonio del Castillo is one of the least known Baroque painters, with a perfect knowledge of Flemish and Italian sources, and undoubtedly the most versatile and prolific sketcher from the Golden Age.

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     Dates: from 24 January to 30 March 2008.

     Place: Botín Foundation Exhibition Room.

This exhibition´s artists, Javier Arce, Rui Calçada Bastos, Liset Castillo, Patricia Dauder, Carmela Garcia, Raul Hidalgo, Pedro Torres,  Ines Schaber and Azucena Vieites,  all received scholarships under the Marcelino Botín Foundation´s 14th Visual Arts Scholarship Programme. With very different backgrounds, and using diverse techniques, they have also developed their artistic projects in different parts of Europe and the United States. They have all been invited to Santander to show the public why they were selected, what their proposals offer and the work produced during the programme.

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