Nasher Prize 2022
Image: Nairy Baghramian, Knee and Elbow, 2020. © Thomas Clark
ART
Nairy Baghramian
Nasher Prize
The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas, has given this year’s Nasher Prize to Nairy Baghramian. The award is given annually to a sculptor. Born in Isfahan, Iran, the Berlin-based artist is known for her abstract sculptures that mimic the form of bodies and consider the relationship between viewers and their environments. Jeremy Strick, director of the Nasher, said that Baghramian’s work "stood out to the jury as exemplary for its consideration of the body, human relationship, and the built environment through sculpture that champions the often-overlooked objects, people, and experiences at play in daily life."
Praemium Imperiale 2021
Image: Australian Islamic Centre, Newport, Melbourne designed by Glenn Murcutt and Hakan Elevli of Melbourne practice Elevli Plus, 2016.
ARCHITECTURE
Glenn Murcutt
Praemium Imperiale for Architecture
Glenn Murcutt is the first Australian to win the Praemium Imperiale. He was also the first Australian to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2002 and the AIA (American Institute of Architects) Gold Medal in 2009. Born in London to Australian parents in 1936, Murcutt moved to Australia aged five. He studied architecture at the Sydney Technical College and established his studio in 1969 before designing a series of houses across Australia, including a pavilion-like house in Wahroonga in 1962 and Marie Short House, which was built in 1974. Recent projects by Murcutt include the Australian Islamic Centre in Melbourne and the Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Centre complex in West Cambewarra.
Image: Fluvial archipelago of Mariuá, Rio Negro, State of Amazonas, Brazil, 2019. © Sebastião Salgado
ART
Sebastião Salgado
Praemium Imperiale for Painting
The Praemium Imperiale is a global arts prize awarded annually by the Japan Art Association. Since its inauguration in 1988, it has become a mark of the arts.
Sebastião Salgado Salgado received the award for painting. He is known for his black-and-white photographs that attempt to visualize climate change, often by picturing places, species, and peoples that are being rapidly reshaped by global warming. Past series have focused on oil wells in Kuwait, coffee workers around the world, and the Amazonia region of Salgado’s home country, Brazil. In addition to his work as an artist, Sebastião Salgado has undertaken various activist initiatives, some of them with his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado.
Image: James Turrell, Aten Reign, 2013, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA.
© Andreas Tjeldflaat
ART
James Turrell
Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture
James Turrell has been widely recognized for his grand installations that make use of elegant plays of light. In 2013, for example, he transformed the Guggenheim Museum in New York with his monumental installation Aten Reign, through which the institution’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda came to resemble a series of colorful concentric ovals via scrims and lights. Since the 1970s, Turrell has been at work on building his biggest piece to date at Roden Crater in northern Arizona, which has yet to open.
Photo London x Nikon
Emerging Photographer Award 2021
Image: Wish you were here, Le Cake-Walk: Rob This England (#4) by Heather Agyepong, 2020.
Commissioned by The Hyman Collection. © Heather Agyepong
PHOTOGRAPHY
Heather Agyepong
Photo London x Nikon Emerging Photographer Award
Heather Agyepong is a visual artist, performer/actor and maker who lives and works in London. Her art practice is concerned with mental health and wellbeing, invisibility, the diaspora and the archive. She uses both lens-based practices and performance with an aim to culminate a cathartic experience for both herself and the viewer.
Her series Wish you were here focuses on the work of Aida Overton Walker, the celebrated African American vaudeville performer who challenged the rigid and problematic narratives of black performers. She was known as the Queen of the Cake Walk which was a dance craze that swept America & Europe in the early 1900s.
About the Photo London x Nikon Emerging Photographer Award
Grands Prix de la Création
de la Ville de Paris 2021
Image: JN_FB-001 by JN. Mellor Club for the Biennale Emergences 2020.
DESIGN
JN. Mellor Club
Grand Prix Mode
Karine Arabian and Franck Blais created JN. Mellor Club, a brand of luxury objects and accessories as a bridge between fashion, design and art. The shoe designer and the set designer/gallery owner worked a few steps away from each other and wanted to create a joint project by combining their talents and expertise. JN.Mellor Club crosses ways of thinking and goes from accessory to object with the same creative approach. JN.Mellor Club favors local and artisanal manufacturing, the recovery of precious materials from dormant stocks and produces unique pieces or in limited series.
Image: Imbricata designed by Lily Alcaraz and Léa Berlier in collaboration with
cabinetmaker Jean Brieuc Atelier, 2021.
DESIGN
Lily Alcaraz and Léa Berlier
Grand Prix Métiers d'art
Both textile designers, Lily Alcaraz and Léa Berlier met while studying at École Duperré. Linked by a wonderful friendship and a passion for weaving, they founded their workshop in 2009. They are inspired by materials: threads, but also leather and paper...which they cut, crush and weave on their looms. If the computer allows them to project themselves into the final result, to technically prepare their projects, it is by "assembling" their mechanical looms, by operating pedals and levers, that they give birth to a few metres of material made by hand.
Image: Chapelle de l’Assomption, Paris 16e, interior design by Studio Lacoua. © Felipe Ribon
DESIGN
Studio Lacoua
Grand Prix Design
Grégory Lacoua graduated from École Boulle in upholstery before choosing a more creative path and joining ENSCI-Les Ateliers (École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle). In 2010 he created his studio. Studio Lacoua imagines objects, places and experiences in the service of a desirable future: urban furniture for public spaces in a Brussels municipality, smart and connected objects for RATP as well as rooms for liturgy for a chapel in Paris. For him, any new creation is a collective and committed act. Each project contributes to expressing and changing our relationship with the world.
About the Grands Prix de la Création de la Ville de Paris
Deutsche Börse Photography
Foundation Prize 2021
Image: Cao Fei, "Nova", 2019. © Cao Fei
PHOTOGRAPHY
Cao Fei
Deutsche Börse Photography
Foundation Prize
Cao Fei was awarded for her first major solo exhibition Blueprints at Serpentine Gallery, London. Working with film, digital media, photography, sculpture and performance, Chinese artist Cao Fei has built an extensive body of work over the last two decades that considers how the rapid development of the digital and other technological advancements have radically altered our perception of self and the way we understand and navigate reality. Her projects often revolve around the effects of automation, virtual realities and hyper urbanisation on the human condition, while further addressing issues of memory, history, consumerism and societal structures – particularly in her native China.
