Prix Meret Oppenheim 2018

The Swiss Federal Office of Culture is presenting the 18th Swiss Grand Award for Art / Prix Meret Oppenheim to three outstanding personalities from Switzerland’s cultural scene whose artistic and architectural work has international impact: artists Sylvie Fleury and Thomas Hirschhorn, as well as architect Luigi Snozzi. The laureates will be honored together with the winners of the Swiss Art Awards on June 11, 2018 in Basel.

Glamour, fashion and luxury are placed on the podium of art in Sylvie Fleury’s work which uses installations and mixed media to construct a paradigm of the new age within consumerist culture. In the spirit of Duchamp’s readymades and Andy Warhol’s Pop Art, brands and logos are exaggerated and deified as a way to comment on superficiality and collective obsession with products. Emerging in the early 1990s, Sylvie Fleury has since held a significant position on the international art stage.

Fuelled by an unyielding desire to defend the democratic values of society, Thomas Hirschhorn has developed a unique artistic language that tackles issues of global politics and consumerism. From his spatial collages to his ephemeral monuments and installations, Hirschhorn consistently engages the viewer through superabundance amid absorbing environments. Created from the most basic everyday materials, his monumental works are concerned with justice and injustice, power and powerlessness, and moral responsibility.

Architect and professor emeritus Luigi Snozzi is considered a leading figure and theoretician emerging from the Ticino school. His characteristic style of exposed concrete as well as his stance toward urban planning interventions have influenced and empowered many generations of architects after him. Snozzi’s built work is the emblem of an architecture that does not submit, but instead assumes its presence to create a new place, and a fertile ground for positive confrontation. With an acute critical view on the conditions and limits of the profession, Luigi Snozzi embodies the ideal of an architect who holds political, cultural and human values.
 

Jury - Federal Art Commission
The jury for the Prix Meret Oppenheim is chaired by Giovanni Carmine (Director Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen). Its members are Laura Arici (Art Historian, Zurich), Valentin Carron (Artist, Fully), Victoria Easton (Architect, Christ & Gantenbein, Basel), Julie Enckell Julliard (Head of Cultural Development Department, HEAD, Geneva), Anne-Julie Raccoursier (Artist, Lausanne), Anselm Stalder (Artist, Basel).

“The approaches of the three winners could not be more different—their visionary works reflect the diversity of today’s world. And that is what ultimately unites them: their concern to understand the world in its complexity and to shape the present in a way that opens up new perspectives.”
–Giovanni Carmine
 

Awards ceremony and exhibition
The award ceremony will take place on June 11, 2018 at 5:30pm (Hall 3, Messe Basel). Film portraits of the Prix Meret Oppenheim winners will be on show in the exhibition Swiss Art Awards 2018, running in parallel to Art Basel (June 12–17, daily from 10am to 7pm, admission free). On the occasion of the award ceremony, the Federal Office of Culture is to release the publication Prix Meret Oppenheim 2018 with portraits and interviews of the laureates.
 

Prix Meret Oppenheim
The Swiss Grand Award for Art / Prix Meret Oppenheim was founded in 2001 by the Federal Office of Culture in collaboration with the Federal Art Commission. It honors figures from the worlds of art and architecture as well as criticism, curation and research whose work is of particular relevance and importance for contemporary art and architecture in Switzerland and beyond.
 

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