Drawing Prize 2025 nominations: Alice Maher, Gideon Kiefer, Ettore Tripodi

On December 12, 2024 in Paris, Daniel and Florence Guerlain have announced the names of the three nominated artists for the 18th Drawing Prize.

Alice Maher was born in 1956 in Ireland. She is represented by the David Nohan Gallery, New York, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin and Purdy Hicks, London.

Alice Maher dives deep into ancestral stories and myths or the subconscious. She attempts to understand whom we are and to embrace the place of the female body in symbiosis with the animal and vegetal world. When she began in the artworld in the 1980s, the figures of artists Louise Bourgeois or Helen Chadwick gave her the impetus to talk not only about women’s rights but also more widely the problems of domination and colonization. Her landscapes testify to her native Ireland which was dispossessed and whose language was forbidden… Although the work admits to being committed and political, it refers to what is buried deep inside ourselves. Her working method is energetic, drawing in charcoal, leaving her pentimenti visible… to support her thought process. “It is not only about acceding to the subconscious, but of granting its permission to get into action in some way”…*

Gideon Kiefer was born in 1970 in Belgium. He is represented by the galleries Martin Kudlek, Brussels and Cologne, the Barbé Gallery, Ghent and Maskara, Mumbai. 

A drawing virtuoso from an early age, Gideon Kiefer plunges his spectator into a world bordering on dreams and reality. Nevertheless, the aim of his somewhat romantic atemporality is to alert us about the ecological crisis. Influenced by Surrealism and Salvador Dalí, he can also feel the presence of the figures of Caravaggio and Diego Velasquez and admits to an affiliation with Caspar David Friedrich. “I like the idea that the images which nourish us can be fantasized or be malleable.” Gideon Kiefer jumbles up his drawings, by effacing them or by adding another medium or quotations. In this way, he hopes to make people aware of global warming and stop the mad race leading to the ruination of the planet. Gideon Kiefer’s world seems calm, his gesture is poised but the tempest is never very far away…*

Ettore Tripodi was born in 1985 in Italy. He is represented by OPR Gallery, Milan.

Mostly through the medium of drawing, Ettore Tripodi deciphers and redefines daily life to extract a disquieting strangeness… With references to art history and tributes to Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix or even Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso or Giorgio de Chirico, he naturally indulges in a dynamic scenography attesting to what he is feeling. “When I start to draw, I have a conceptual idea that is nurtured one sheet after the other. This is not revealed by a precise image but is developed in a kind of grouping of sensations.” The artist works on this freedom that he leaves up to the paper and to “whatever the drawing itself brings.” All of Ettore Tripodi’s archetypes replay the history of myths, between his personal interpretation of the Garden of Earthly Delights and a strange or suffocating everyday life…*

*Extracts from texts by Marie Maertens.

An exhibition of works by the three shortlisted artists will be presented at the Salon du Dessin from March 26 to 31, 2024 (Palais Brongniart, Place de la Bourse, Paris). The jury will meet on March 27 at the Salon du Dessin and the winner will be announced the same day at noon.

The members of the jury are: Isabelle Dervaux, Richard Mumby, Carole Neuberger, Irina Zucca Alessandrelli, François-Roger Cazala, Antoine Godeau, Jean-Bernard Ponthus, Florence and Daniel Guerlain.

About the Prize
Awarded for the first time in 2007, the Prize honours artists for whom drawing is a significant part of their work.

The three artists nominated each year by a committee of six experts may be of French or foreign nationality on condition that they entertain a privileged cultural link with France through institutional exhibitions, studies or being in residence there. The three artists are presented to a jury that changes with each prize and chooses the winner.

The Prize’s endowment is 15,000 EUR for the laureate and 5,000 EUR for each of the two other artists. A work by the winner is offered, by the Foundation to the National museum of modern art.

Past laureates: Sylvia Bächli, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, Catharina Van Eetvelde, Marcel Van Eeden, Jorinde Voigt, Susan Hefuna, Tomasz Kowalski, Jockum Nordström, Cameron Jamie, Ciprian Muresan, Mamma Andersson, Claire Morgan, Juan Uslé, Françoise Pétrovitch, Olga Chernysheva, Pascal Leyder, Amir Nave.