Renée Green and Frieda Toranzo Jaeger

This year, the US artist Renée Green will receive the Finkenwerder Art Prize, which is endowed with 20,000 euros. Initiated in 1999 by Kulturkreis Finkenwerder e.V. and donated by Airbus Operations GmbH, the prize has been awarded to Georges Adéagbo, Candida Höfer, Ulla von Brandenburg and Daniel Richter, among others. In cooperation with the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (HFBK), the Finkenwerder Art Award has undergone a realignment and will be expanded in the future to include the aspect of promoting young artists. The newly established Finkenwerder Prize for recent graduates, worth 10,000 euros, is aimed at graduates of the HFBK Hamburg and will be awarded for the first time this year to Frieda Toranzo Jaeger.

With Renée Green (*1959), the jury chose an internationally renowned position who has been known for complex conceptual installations since the early 1990s. As a traveler, Renée Green collects experiences, stories and knowledge in different places and puts them into a living connection with each other. Spoken and written language - documentary, poetic, fictional - finds expression on textiles and paintings, on documents, notes and photographs, in books, audio pieces and videos. Meanings thus become fluid, insights questioned. Her work ranges in thematic diversity from music and pop culture, film and literature, to site specificity and architecture, to migration, legacies of displacement, and feminism. She has held numerous professorships at international art schools and is currently a professor at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, Cambridge, USA. Most recently, her work has been on view as part of the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin or Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (*1988) completed her master’s studies with Prof. Jutta Koether at the HFBK Hamburg in 2019. She exemplifies a young, internationally influenced position of female artists who deal with different cultural structures and sign systems in their painting. By means of borrowings from traditional Mexican textile art, a playful approach to the fetish car, or the integration of performative and installative components, globally conducted queer-feminist discourses are made directly alive and tangible for the audience. Her work has been shown in numerous international exhibitions, including the Baltimore Museum of Art; Reena Spaulings, New York; Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin.

The members of this year’s jury were Thomas Demand, Simon Denny, Martin Köttering, Bettina Steinbrügge, and Jorinde Voigt.