Carnegie Art Award 2012 til Heikki Marila
Finnish artist Heikki Marila wins the Carnegie Art Award!
1 September, 2011
Heikki Marila; Kukat XXVII / Flowers XXVII, 2009 Oil on canvas, 250×200 cm. Fotograf: Johann Bergenholtz, Värnamo
With a more stringent selection procedure, with fewer artists showing more works, a greater focus will be put on painting. This year, Finnish artist Heikki Marila’s exuberant floral paintings win the Carnegie Art Award first prize of one million Swedish kronor, one of the world’s largest art awards.
This is the tenth edition of the Carnegie Art Award for the most prominent Nordic artists, and the opening of the tenth touring exhibition, Carnegie Art Award 2012, featuring 17 Nordic artists selected in tough competition between 127 nominees.
The jury has awarded the artist Heikki Marila (b. 1966) the first prize of one million SEK. Marila is showing an impressive series of paintings where his characteristically flowing, expressive style is channelled into contemporary versions of the symbolically-laden 17th century Dutch floral still-lifes. In addition to the Carnegie Art Award 2012 exhibition, Marila will also be featured in a solo exhibition at Korjaamo in Helsinki, opening on 6 October.
Heikki Marila
The second prize of SEK 600,000 is awarded to the Swedish artist Ann Edholm (b. 1953) for her veritably sculptural approach to painting in monumental works with strongly graphic and geometric elements.
Ann Edholm
Edholm is currently featured in several ongoing projects, including an exhibition that opened recently at Vida Museum, Öland, showing works from the Rasjö collection. She is the only Swede featured at the ABC Art Berlin Contemporary “About Painting”. Her solo show at Galerie Nordenhake opens in October, and in conjunction with this she is publishing a new book.
Christian Schmidt Rasmussen
Danish Christian Schmidt-Rasmussen (b. 1963) is awarded the third prize of SEK 400,000
. With his figurative and unexpected painterly imagery, Schmidt-Rasmussen mixes the quotidian with the poetic and quirky, revealing that things are not always what they seem to be. Schmidt-Rasmussen is currently featured in an exhibition at the Essl Museum in Vienna, and in January he will be participating in an exhibition at the Holstebro Kunstmuseum.
The Carnegie Art Award scholarship of SEK 100,000 to a young artist is awarded this year to the up-and-coming Klara Lidén (b. 1979). With simple, found materials and means, she reflects on and searches for alternative perspectives on everyday life in works surging with compressed energy. Lidén is currently featured in a solo exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. She is also participating in the Venice Biennale and is one of four artists nominated for the National Gallery Prize for Young Art which is currently showing at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin
.
The prizes will be awarded at the opening of Carnegie Art Award 2012 at the Stenersen Museum in Oslo on 17 November, 2011. In Stockholm the exhibition will open at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in March 2012, before touring to the Amos Anderson Museum in Helsinki in May 2012 and Sophienholm in Lyngby/Copenhagen in September 2012.