Swiss Art Awards 2021 exhibition

Today the Swiss Federal Office of Culture announced this year’s winners of the Swiss Art Awards, Switzerland’s most acclaimed art competition. The awards annually honour outstanding positions in contemporary art, architecture as well as critique, publishing, exhibition. 

The Swiss Art Awards are part of Switzerland’s oldest and most renowned art competition—the Schweizer Kunstwettbewerb (Swiss Art Competition). Organised annually by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture since 1899, the exhibition offers a unique survey of the richly diverse, active and highly networked art scenes in all of Switzerland’s cantons and language regions. Each of the awards carries a 25,000 CHF prize.

Exhibition running in parallel with Art Basel
The works of the laureates and all finalists of the Swiss Art Competition are on view in the Swiss Art Awards exhibition, conceived by Léa Fluck and the team. This opens with a soft opening on Monday, September 20 from 12pm.

Swiss Art Awards 2021 laureates

Art
L’Acte pur – Tristan Lavoyer & Andreas Hochuli (founded in 2018)
Marie Bette (b. 1988 in Paris (FR), works in Geneva and Paris (FR))
Maëlle Gross (b. 1988 in Eden-Roch, works in Geneva and Lausanne)
Pauline Julier (b. 1981 in Geneva, works in Geneva)
Hunter Longe (b. 1985 in Oakland (US), works in Geneva)
Marie Matusz (b. 1994 in Toulouse (FR), works in Basel)
Maria Pomiansky (b. 1971 in Moscow (RU), works in Zurich)
Paulo Wirz (b. 1990 in Pindamonhangaba (BR), works in Zurich and Geneva)

Architecture
MacIver-Ek Chevroulet (founded in 2018, work in Neuchâtel)

Critique, publishing, exhibition
Sonnenstube (founded in 2013, based in Lugano)
Rosa Brux (founded in 2012, based in Geneva)

Laureate 2019 of the category architecture
The installation Anthropomorphe Form by 2019 architecture laureate Edelaar Mosayebi Inderbitzin Architekten with Fabian Bircher occupies the entire exhibition hall of the Swiss Art Awards with its textile ceiling and transforms it into a new architectural space. The translucent textile is suspended on thin ropes in five axes, with each rope being moved by one of forty-two motors. They are controlled by an algorithm that processes different parameters of human and atmospheric activity: the noise level, the number and distribution of visitors, the speed of their movements, etc. Almost unnoticed, the textile roof becomes the actual organ of the visitors present and continues to change as a background for the exhibition by taking different shapes and forms. Anthropomorphe Form translates the influence of humans on the environment in which we move and the traditionally solid architecture into a subtle commentary on our age of the Anthropocene.

Jury — Federal Art Commission
The jury for the Swiss Art Awards is chaired by Raffael Dörig (Director of the Kunsthaus Langenthal). Its members are Laura Arici (Art Historian, Zurich), Victoria Easton (Architect, Christ & Gantenbein, Basel), Julie Enckell Julliard (Head of the Cultural Development Department, HEAD, Geneva), San Keller (Artist, Zurich) and Anne-Julie Raccoursier (Artist, Lausanne). The invited experts for visual arts are Luca Frei (since 2021), Lucie Kolb (since 2020), Uriel Orlow (since 2019), and Una Szeemann (since 2020); for architecture they are Jeannette Kuo (since 2020) and Tanya Zein (since 2019).

Public guided tours
3:30–4:30pm, Tuesday to Sunday

Publication
The Swiss Art Awards 2021 publication, scheduled to launch in autumn, will present the laureates’ works, jury statements and further texts on the award.

Accompanying programme
A special program with on-site and online events was developed in the context of this year’s edition. The activities programme is available at swissartawards.ch

COVID-19 regulations
Please note that due to the epidemiological situation we have to carry out an admission control. You will need to show the following documents: a valid Covid certificate (info) and your identity card or passport. To simplify the process, we recommend you to download the “Covid Certificate App” for free.

For press enquiries please contact
KEINE AGENTUR
Jenni Schmitt, T +41 78 940 04 37
Andrea Brun, T + 41 76 321 00 87
media-kunst [​at​] schweizerkulturpreise.ch