The Marseille-based artist Pauline Curnier Jardin has been awarded the National Gallery Berlin Prize this year - because her work is so challenging and unsettling. Curnier Jardin combines visual and narrative elements of theater and cinema, thereby transcending forms of representation - for example, when films fit into large sculptures that the viewer has to enter.
The unanimous decision announced the jury on Thursday. The biennial award of the National Gallery is considered one of the most important in the field of young art and awards artists under 40 who live and work in Germany. The prize is endowed with a solo exhibition including a catalog for the award winner.
In the 16-minute installation "Qu'un Sang Impure", for example, the artist takes up the short film "A Love Song" by Jean Genet, but replaces the young inmates of a prison after post-menopausal women who are as excessive as they are disturbing about their erotic power celebrate. Beyond the cycle of reproduction, detached from male desires, Curnier Jardin gives her actresses a special power.
The award was given for the tenth time. In addition to Curnier Jardin, Simon Fujiwara, Flaka Haliti and Katja Novitskova have been nominated for the biennial National Gallery Friends' Award. Works by the four contenders had been exhibited at Hamburger Bahnhof since mid-August.
The winners of recent years include Olafur Eliasson, Tino Sehgal, Monica Bonvicini, Christian Jankowski, Katharina Grosse and Anne Imhof. Polnica Agniesza Polska won the award last year, which also featured gritty video installations.
Exhibition : "Prize of the Nationalgalerie 2019", Museum Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, until 16 February 2020
