Arts

Cindy Sherman

Award citation:

“for redefining the concept of art made with a camera”.

Prize Share:

None

Cindy Sherman (born in 1954) is one of the most important and influential artists of the past decades. Her selection by the jury panel, which comprises senior curators from leading international museums, has been unanimous. Sherman’s works have been displayed over the years in dozens of solo and group exhibitions in the world’s prime museums. They can be found in museums and private collections. Sherman was recognized with numerous awards and prizes celebrating her outstanding achievements as a distinct, original and meaningful creator. Sherman’s performative actions are documented by her camera. She transforms in front of the camera while providing a critical reflection of the values of the changing contemporary culture. Sherman’s works emphasize the gender and age discourse, reviews the history of art and popular culture, and deliberates ethics in an age of digital manipulation.

For five decades, Cindy Sherman has redefined the concept of art made with a camera with trailblazing originality. From her earliest work as a student in the mid-1970s, to her digital experiments today, Sherman has continually explored the construction of identity, probing its relation to mass media, popular culture, and visual codes.

The artist’s acclaimed “Untitled Film Stills” series, 1977-80, transformed portraiture. Began when she was just 23, the series comprises 70 black-and-white photographs of Sherman in various female guises: the new-to-the-city ingénue, the vulnerable wife, the flirtatious librarian. Compiled from 1950s and ’60s B movies, and media absorbed by the artist, the characters are immediately recognizable, yet without distinction. “Untitled Film Stills” suggests the limited, media-framed identities available for women, and has remained a touchstone of 20th century photography.

At the core of her practice, Sherman holds a mirror to society and the culture around her. In her work since “Untitled Film” Stills, Sherman has staged herself as withering socialites, uneasy centerfolds, and grotesque clowns – alluding at the obedience and capitulation to the ongoing performance of the “self” in the social role-play. She addressed the representations of sexuality, seduction, objectification, and sexual violence.

Her recent work challenges the concept of personal authenticity. She takes the photographic manipulation of the portrait into the virtual-digital world, one of the social networks, or aesthetic medicine consumption and the structured distortion beget by software image processing. In her later works, Sherman’s greatness becomes even more apparent as she continues to innovate and challenge the spectators. No artist has achieved the psychological shape-shifting of Sherman, as she time and time again expands the potential of the photographic image, as well as art’s role in serving as a mirror and a sophisticated, challenging critical tool of its time.

Olafur Eliasson

Award citation:

“for uniting art and science to trigger moments of individual and collective revelation”.

Prize share:

None

Rosemarie Trockel

Award citation:

“for her multidimensional art practice, which provides a powerful model that engages the mainstream obliquely and critically. Rather than seeking a position at art’s center, she orbits it by choosing less familiar roads and venues, and thus avoids becoming fixed and predictable”.

Prize share:

None

Art that engages and integrates materials, processes and concepts from multiple fields, disciplines and traditions. Trockel draws variously on the vernacular, the fine arts and popular culture, to question prevailing opinions and familiar modes of working, thus redefining art for the future;

The many dimensions of her art practice, informed by a feminist agenda that is open-ended and never dogmatic;

Her influence on younger artists and her support for them, through curatorial ventures and collecting, as well as teaching as professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf;

Her acuity in exploring issues of exhibition-making, presentation and display that includes a rethinking of such familiar forms as the retrospective, solo and group shows, often through collaboration. Trockel inventively addresses the exhibition itself as an art medium and form.

Her questioning of the conventional hierarchies of the art world, by making artist books and multiples an integral part of her art-making, alongside sculptures, paintings, ceramics, textiles, drawing, printmaking, videos and design.

Rosemarie Trockel (born in 1952, in Schwerte, Germany) has been widely recognized through major exhibitions and prizes. She represented Germany at the 1999 Venice Biennale and has been featured in numerous international contemporary art exhibitions, including the 1997 Documenta and the 2008 Carnegie International. Her substantial list of museum shows includes the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Musée d´Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Dia Art Foundation in New York and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.

Michelangelo Pistoletto

Award citation:

“for his constantly inventive career as an artist, educator and activist, whose restless intelligence has created prescient forms of art that contribute to fresh understanding of the world”.

Prize share:

None

Michelangelo Pistoletto (born in 1933 in Biella, Italy) has pursued an extraordinarily rich and varied career, and has a significant list of major achievements to his credit. His art developed from painting to photo-silk screening of life-size images of people on reflective steel, creating environments, performances, film and video art, sculpture with everyday materials, and establishing a system for communication between art and every other human activity.

Retrospectives of Pistoletto’s art have been exhibited at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice (1976), the Palacio de Cristal, Madrid (1983), the Forte di Belvedere, Florence (1984), the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome (1990), and the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2000). His work has been featured at leading international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1966, 1976, 1978, 1984, 1986, and 1993) and Documenta, in Kassel (1968, 1982, 1992, and 1997). In 1994, Pistoletto announced the creation of the Progetto Arte, aimed at uniting the diverse strands of human civilization through art. To further this goal, in 1998, he established the Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto- a center for the study and promotion of creative projects- in Biella.

Writing on the value of art and on his purpose in founding this innovative educational centre, Pistoletto asserted that: “Artists have a unique and totally free way of understanding and analyzing society, and consequently of being engaged with it. Cittadellarte firmly believes that art can interact among all the diverse spheres of human activity that form society, and is thereby a generator for responsible transformation of society.”

The jurors have awarded Pistoletto the Wolf Foundation Prize, on the basis of his long and highly committed career and his ongoing ability to come up with new possibilities and to encourage the application of imagination to artistic and social change.

Louise Bourgeois

Award citation:

“for an oeuvre, that for six decades and encompassing a remarkable range of media, has sustained aesthetic and formal innovation, intellectual complexity and contemporary relevance”.

Prize share:

None

Louise Bourgeois’ career spans the entire 20th century. Her work has contributed to the evolution of some of the most important movements in modern art – ranging from Surrealism in the 1930s, to Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, and to sculpture in “the expanded field” of installation at the end of the century. At the same time however, hers is a singular practice. Bourgeois has experimented with an extraordinary range of techniques, including drawing and printmaking, carving, casting, sewing and assemblage. She combines formal invention and virtuoso craftsmanship, with intellectual enquiry and poetic vision. Inspired by psychoanalysis, Bourgeois uses the figure – fragmented, encased, totemic or as an absent presence – to explore familial relations, gender and mythology. Although she draws on autobiography, her narratives have transcended the personal, to speak to successive generations. Bourgeois’ achievement is all the more remarkable, in having flourished within a male dominated culture.

Bourgeois was born in Paris, in 1911. Having been awarded a Baccalaureate in Philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1932, she decided to move into the arts and studied art history at the L’Ecole du Louvre. Working as an assistant in numerous ateliers, she combined her childhood experiences of working in her family’s tapestry studio with learning the classical techniques of painting and sculpture. Bourgeois moved to New York in 1939, where she made her US debut with a print exhibition, at the Brooklyn Museum. Making exhibitions of prints, paintings, and, in 1949 her first show of sculptures, Bourgeois became part of New York’s avant garde. Much as she broke down divisions between media, she also crossed disciplines, collaborating not only with numerous other artists, but also with practitioners from the worlds of dance and theatre.

A small selection of the huge number of group exhibitions featuring Bourgeois’ work, is a testament to the sustained contemporaneity of her practice. Her work was shown alongside Surrealists such as Breton and Tanguy in the 1940s, while in the 1950s it was featured in surveys of American abstract painters. In 1966 Lucy Lippard included her work in a celebration of new “conceptual practices”, which included Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman. She was featured in the 1972 Whitney Biennale; in the Centre Pompidou’s Magicien de la Terre, in 1982; Documenta IX in 1992, and Documenta XI in 2002.

Bourgeois was the first living woman artist to have a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1982, and she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1993. She also inaugurated the founding of London’s Tate Modern in 2000, with a series of monumental works, fusing sculpture with architecture for the Unilever Series Turbine Hall commission. Bourgeois’ signature giant spider instantly provided an informal logo for the new museum.

This prize also recognizes the artist’s importance as a writer; and as a voice against oppression. In the 1940s, Bourgeois contributed of her works to help the French Underground, and in 1949, along with Marcel Duchamp, she co-curated a show of anti-Nazi poetry and writings. In the 1970s, she became active in the feminist movement, continuing into the 21st century, as an icon for women artists around the world.