The Rotarians of Lanzarote have awarded the Lanzarote artist César Manrique as the most illustrious and influential figure of the 20th century, coinciding with the centenary of Rotary, an institution that promotes solidarity, culture and global understanding.
Rotary Club Lanzarote, chaired by the Lanzarote journalist Severino A. Betancort, will present the Conejero of the Year Award posthumously to César Manrique this Saturday, July 2, during a gala dinner, for his contribution, during his lifetime, to the development, progress and environmental protection of his native island, Lanzarote.
The event will take place at 9 p.m. at the Hotel Teguise Playa facilities, in Costa Teguise, and in addition to the members of the rotary club, civil and military authorities, relatives of Manrique and directors of the Foundation that supervises and manages his important artistic and cultural legacy will attend. In addition, a wide representation of social, cultural and business agents from Lanzarote and the Canary Islands will attend this event.
Since the creation of the Rotary Club of Lanzarote, the Conejero of the Year Award has been presented annually to outstanding personalities and institutions that have contributed to the progress and development of the Island of the Volcanoes. This year 2005, coinciding with the centenary of Rotary, César Manrique has been awarded, posthumously, as the conejero who has contributed the most to the progress and environmental protection of Lanzarote throughout the 20th century.
During this special event, the new board of directors of the Rotary Club Lanzarote will also take office, chaired for the year 2005-06 by the well-known restaurateur and hotel businessman Antonio Hernández Abreu, an act known as the Change of Collar. César Manrique (1919-1992) was born in Arrecife, Lanzarote, an island in which his artistic career has left indelible marks. After completing his studies at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid (a city in which he lived between 1945 and 1964), he frequently exhibits his painting both inside and outside of Spain. He participates in the XXVIII and XXX Venice Biennale (1955 and 1960) and in the III Hispano-American Biennial
of Havana (1955). In the early fifties he entered non-figurative art and investigated the qualities of matter until he turned it into the essential protagonist of his compositions. He is thus linked - like other Spanish painters such as Antoni Tàpies, Lucio Muñoz, Manuel Millares... - to the informalist movement of those years.
