Prize of the Böttcherstraße in Bremen 2022 / Sunset: A Celebration of the Sinking Sun

Prize of the Böttcherstraße in Bremen 2022 
The 30,000 EUR Prize of the Böttcherstraße in Bremen, one of the most important awards for contemporary art in Germany, will be presented for the 48th time in 2022. It honours living visual artists in the German-speaking area for their outstanding contribution to cutting-edge contemporary art. Distinguished curators each independently recommended an artist whose works will be presented in an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bremen. This year’s nominees are: Karimah Ashadu, Nadja Buttendorf, Pınar Öğrenci, Leunora Salihu, Oskar Schmidt, Marianna Simnett, Wanda Stolle, Noemi Weber and Anna Witt. Over the course of the exhibition, a renowned international jury will determine the prize winner. Over the past years, recipients have included Ulrike Müller (2020), Arne Schmitt (2018), Emeka Ogboh (2016), Nina Beier (2014), Daniel Knorr (2012), Thea Djordjadze (2009), Ulla von Brandenburg (2007), Clemens von Wedemeyer (2005), Tino Sehgal (2003), Olafur Eliasson (1997), or Wolfgang Tillmans (1995).

Sunset: A Celebration of the Sinking Sun 
Humans love sunsets. When the sun sets and melts into a beautiful display of colours in the evening sky, the experience is mesmerizing and deeply moving for nearly everyone. It is an event that repeats every day but is nevertheless perceived as a final act. There is a reason we can find millions of images of sunsets online.

From the viewpoint of the fine arts, this excessively popular motif has lost its allure: It is seen as tacky and twee. To restore its reputation, the Kunsthalle Bremen is spanning the history of art with its exhibition Sunset. Significant loans and works from its own collection take viewers from romanticism to the 21st century. These works capture the emotional power of a single moment in time that functions as a metaphor for life and its finite nature, its breath-taking beauty, its dreams and upheavals and its apocalyptic visions. In addition, numerous contemporary works reflect our outlook and the questions we are faced with when looking at this heavenly spectacle today. They examine the overlap between art and kitsch, the artistic approaches addressing the physics of the phenomenon between the afterglow and the twilight hour and atmospheric research in a figurative and a concrete environmental sense. 

A total of around 150 paintings, drawings, graphics, photographs, videos and installations by, among others Anna Ancher, Heike Kati Barath, Carl Gustav Carus, Lyonel Feininger, Fischli & Weiss, Caspar David Friedrich, Claude Monet, Emil Nolde, Jörg Sasse, Norbert Schwontkowski and Félix Vallotton become a cosmos that leads into art history and puts the change in cultures of perception up for discussion right up to the present.

Open hours
Tuesday, 10am–9pm
Wednesday–Sunday, 10am–5pm (until 6pm during the Sunset exhibition)