Pierre Huyghe Awarded Kurt Schwitters Prize For 2015

Pierre Huyghe

After narrowly missing out on the 2014 Vincent Award at the Gemeentemuseum, in The Hague, the 52-year-old French artist, known for creating “living art” installations, was awarded The Kurt Schwitter’s Prize for his “contemporary reinterpretation of the artist’s principles of collage and the poetry of everyday life, the jury has announced. Huyghe will be granted €25,000, or £18,500 in prize money.

The Sprengel Museum, Hannover recently announced in a statement that the artist will be presented with the award at the end of the year. The museum also revealed that an exhibition featuring the Huyghe’s work is planned to coincide with the museum’s award ceremony.

The Kurt Schwitters prize was founded in 1982 by the city of Hannover, and is awarded bi-annually by the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung, which is a charitable subsidiary of the German Sparkasse Bank. The prize is awarded to contemporary artists whose work contains conceptual references to Kurt Schwitters.

The artist was born in 1962, and works in a variety of media spanning film, sculpture, and living systems. Huyghe has numerous international solo exhibitions to his credit at renowned institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2013); the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010); the Tate Modern, London (2006); and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2003). The artist is known for works that include living creatures – such as Huyghe’s recent work ‘Human’, part of the Pierre Huyghe retrospective in LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion. The piece was the sensation of Documenta 13, and included a live white dog with a leg painted in hot pink.

The Ibizan hound was also a work of art. Huyghe has long used animals and flora, ranging from fish to palms to even deer, in his work. The living components in rhe artist’s pieces add to the fact that nothing remains static – both the sum of parts and whole constantly shift, based on the rhythms expressed in the space.

The Kurt Schwitters prize was founded in 1982 by the city of Hannover, and is awarded bi-annually by the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung, the charitable subsidiary of the German Sparkasse Bank. The prize is awarded to contemporary artists whose work contains conceptual references to Kurt Schwitters. Born in Hannover, Schwitters worked in many genres and media, including Dada-ism, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography – and what came to be known as installation art. The artist is most famous for his collages, namely his Merz Pictures.

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