Azul López

This exhibition showcases illustrations created by Azul (formerly Andrés) López – the 2022 Mexican winner of the 12th International Bologna Children’s Book Fair-Fundación SM Award for Illustration – for her picturebook Volver a mirar.

The book was commissioned as part of the prize, established to discover talented under-35 illustrators featured in the Illustrators Exhibition, along with €15,000 in financial support via a cheque from the Fundación SM. 

The winner is asked to create a picturebook based on a classical tale or legend from his/her own country for publication by SM. That book is launched the following year at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair; the original illustrations are shown in a solo exhibition dedicated to the illustrator.

The 2022’s Jury made of illustrators Gusti Rosemffet and Alessandro Sanna, and Pablo Núñez, Corporate Art Manager at SM, has unanimously decided to award the prize to Azul López, for:

"the quality of the composition, the evocative representation of nature with a strong pictorial texture and a traditional style of great meticulousness in the treatment of details, and for the ability to create a very precise, believable and immersive world that gives rise to whoever looks at it to imagine it beyond the illustration and want to enter it." 

Azul López (formerly Andrés López) is an author and illustrator of picture books. Her books have been published in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Brazil, Italy, France, Spain, South Korea, the Netherlands, the United States, Germany, Greece and Sweden. Her stories and illustrations have received several international awards, the most recent being the International Award for Illustration Bologna Children’s Book Fair and Fundación SM and the Green Island Prize awarded by the Nami Island International Picture Book Illustration Concours in South Korea. 

Azul uses emotions, memories and metaphors as raw material to tell the stories she imagines. When she is not in her studio working on her next books, she enjoys walking, looking for flowers in the grass and spending time looking at the sky, observing how it is enough to pay a little attention to witness and be part of how wonderful it is to see how things change.