Preis Der Nationalgalerie 2019

About

In the autumn of 2019, the Preis der Nationalgalerie will be awarded for the tenth time. It promotes important positions of contemporary art that have gained significance through new artistic approaches and that reflect the liveliness and international scope of the art scene in Germany.

Every two years, four artists under forty years of age who live and work in Germany are nominated for the award and presented in a shortlist exhibition. From among the 70 nominations, the international jury has chosen the following artists:

Pauline Curnier Jardin (born 1980 in Marseille, lives in Berlin)
Simon Fujiwara (born 1982 in London, lives in Berlin)
Flaka Haliti (born 1982 in Prishtina, lives in Munich)
Katja Novitskova (born 1984 in Tallinn, lives in Amsterdam and Berlin)

The winner is selected by a panel of experts and the following year is granted a large solo show in one of the venues of the Nationalgalerie. In addition, a catalogue is published at the occasion of the exhibition. Previous winners have included Agnieszka Polska (2017), Anne Imhof (2015), Mariana Castillo Deball (2013), Cyprien Gaillard (2011), Omer Fast (2009), Ceal Floyer (2007), Monica Bonvicini (2005), Elmgreen & Dragset (2002) and Dirk Skreber (2000). In conjunction with the Preis der Nationalgalerie, the joint award for film art has been awarded since 2011 in cooperation with the Deutsche Filmakademie. This award is aimed at young filmmakers who, with their experimental films, move along the boundary of art.

Pauline Curnier Jardin
Pauline Carnier Jardin convinced the jury with her transgressive artistic practice adopting visual and narrative elements as much from the theatre tradition as from narrative cinema. Her often humorous works are the outcome of an individual approach towards historical situations and the collective repertoire of stories, religious and cultural traditions, and mythologies by transposing them into a contemporary experimental language. The jury was especially drawn to her approach towards gender roles, diversity of identity and queerness*, addressed from the position of a »precarious feminism<.

Simon Fujiwara
Working across performance, painting, video, sculpture, and installation, the jury was drawn to Simon Fujiwara’s compelling commentary on the human condition in the 21st century. Through a mixture of references drawn from the current politics, architecture, technology, the »internetic« media and from his own biography and that of others, the artist addresses the notion of hyperrealism and its extreme relevance today. He explores the area in between empathy and remoteness, embodiment and disembodiment, establishment and rupture. Here, in this undefined and fluid zone of living, he seems to locate the power of the individual in an increasingly corporatized, global world.

Flaka Haliti
The jury chose Flaka Haliti for her complex and hybrid sculptural practice. Using an abstract language that is »contaminated« by the everyday and alludes to trivial objects, Haliti deals with often very specific issues of urgent political impact, focussing on migration and mobility, on borders and their fluidity and the question of free movement within Europe. She succeeds in giving these subject matters both a pressing and a metaphorical and poetic quality. The jury perceives in her work a feminist perspective that is the source of a powerful critical thinking. It is based on a strong awareness for the impact of the socio-political and individual conditions on artistic practice.

Katja Novitskova
One of the pioneers of an artistic language that became known as >post internet art<, Katja Novitskova convinced the jury with the virtuosity and complexity with which she brings together images of nature and technology. Her immersive sculptural environments address the transformation of organic bodies into digital data and attempt, so to speak, a re-materialization of our extensively virtual world. Capturing the process of transformation, she creates futuristic landscapes and maps of information and exemplifies the growing inadequacy of the division between the real and the virtual.