Prix Meret Oppenheim 2023

Upon recommendation of the Federal Art Commission, the Federal Office of Culture is pleased to award the Prix Meret Oppenheim 2023 to three outstanding Swiss culture practitioners: art historian Stanislaus von Moos; artist Uriel Orlow; and architecture platform Parity Group.

Stanislaus von Moos (b. 1940, Lucerne, lives and works in Ennetbürgen and Zurich)
Stanislaus von Moos is an art historian known worldwide for his analyses of how built environments are shaped by complex historical, political, economic, and ideological agendas. His curiosity, engagement and erudition render von Moos the epitome of the historian as a public intellectual. His work as scholar, curator, and educator has bridged several disciplinary boundaries over the past sixty years, including architecture, art, history, and criticism. From Renaissance military fortifications to the modernist avant-garde, from pop culture to Minimalism, von Moos has covered a wide range of art historical subjects. This wide range of interests—presented with lucid, often ironic, tone—is informed by a consistent concern with architecture and art as expressions of modernity. His work has provided decisive critical insight into the work of architects such as Le Corbusier, Herzog & de Meuron and Rem Koolhaas, as well as international-acclaimed artists such as Pipilotti Rist, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, among others. Through his teachings at international leading universities, Stanislaus von Moos has inspired several generations of students, many of whom are now leaders in the international arts and architecture communities.

Uriel Orlow (b. 1973, Zurich, lives and works in Lisbon, London, Zurich)
Uriel Orlow is recognized for his use of modular, multimedia installations that combine film, photography, drawing and sound. His work focuses on specific locations and micro-histories and brings together multiple image-regimes and narrative modes. His practice is research-based, process-oriented, and often in dialogue with other disciplines and collaborators, unfolding over extensive periods of time and across different geographies. His projects engage with residues of colonialism, spatial manifestations of memory, social and ecological justice. Working with plants as political actors, he maps out more-than-human entanglements and different forms of witnessing and resistance. In Orlow’s work, the exhibition space becomes a terrain for exploration and reflection that invites visitors to become active participants. Orlow’s work has been widely shown at international exhibitions, including the 54th Biennale di Venezia, Manifesta 9/12 (Genk/Palermo) and biennials in Kochi, Kathmandu, Dakar, Berlin, Sharjah as well as museums including London’s Tate Modern and Whitechapel Gallery; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Kunsthaus Zurich; and art spaces in Geneva, St. Gallen, Ramallah, Marseille, Cairo, Istanbul, Mexico City, Dublin, New York, Toronto, Melbourne, Johannesburg and elsewhere.

Parity Group
Parity Group is a grassroots initiative that emerged from the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich in 2014. A network and debate platform, it dwells on analysis and debate around issues of equality, diversity and inequality through different formats and events in the field of architecture. After first organizing Parity Talks, a symposium that later became an annual event organized on International Women’s Day, the group launched the 9 Points of Parity manifesto, a strategic list of measures dedicated to gender equality within its department. The success of this manifesto, as well as the achievement of most of the goals, such as the creation of a Parity and Diversity Commission, have had an important influence on the activities of the architectural community and educational institutions in Switzerland and beyond. The Parity Group demonstrates how grassroots movements can thrive and have an impact within large-scale institutions, promoting a network of solidarity and shared interests, and forever changing the conversation around parity and diversity.

Publication and video capsules
The Federal Office of Culture is publishing the Swiss Grand Award for Art | Prix Meret Oppenheim 2023, featuring portraits and interviews of the award winners. The interviews were conducted by Irina Davidovici with Stanislaus von Moos; Andrea Thal and Giovanni Carmine with Uriel Orlow; and Vera Sacchetti with Parity Group.
ISBN 978-3-907394-04-5; German, French, Italian, English

Director Marie-Eve Hildbrand (Terrain Vague, Lausanne) is producing video capsules of the laureates; German and French with subtitles.

They will be first presented at the Swiss Art Awards 2023 exhibition and be online from June 13, 2023, at swissartawards.ch.

Prix Meret Oppenheim
Created in 2001 by the Federal Office of Culture in collaboration with the Federal Art Commission, the Swiss Grand Award for Art / Prix Meret Oppenheim is awarded on the recommendation of the Commission to artists, architects, curators, researchers, and critics, whose internationally renowned work is of particular relevance and importance to Swiss artistic and architectural practice. Each award carries prize money of CHF 40’000.

For press inquiries please contact: media-kunst [​at​] schweizerkulturpreise.ch