2002 Praemium Imperiale Laureates Announcement

2002 Praemium Imperiale Laureates

The recipients of the 14th Praemium Imperiale are:

Painting: SIGMAR POLKE

Sculpture:  GIULIANO VANGI

Architecture: NORMAN FOSTER

Music: DIETRICH FISCHER-DIESKAU

Theatre/film: JEAN-LUC GODARD

The artists are recognized and awarded for their achievements, for the impact they have had internationally on the arts, and for their role in enriching the global community. The five recipients each receive 15 million yen (c. $125,000), and a diploma and medal presented by honorary patron of the Japan Art Association Prince Hitachi in an awards ceremony in Tokyo. The awards ceremony will be held on October 23rd, 2002.

The Praemium Imperiale is an annual award given by the Japan Art Association for global achievement in the arts. Since its foundation in 1989, it has become a mark of the highest international distinction. The 2002 laureates join a roster of 67 artists, including David Hockney, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Christo and Jean-Claude, Anthony Caro, Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Leonard Bernstein, Mstislav Rostropovich, Ravi Shankar, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Peter Brook.

2002 PRAEMIUM IMPERIALE LAUREATES

Painting ：SIGMAR POLKE

Sigmar Polke was born in Oels/Schlesien, Poland in 1941 and studied art at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf under Joseph Beuys between 1961 and 1967. Polke first gained notoriety in 1963 alongside fellow student Gerhard Richter with their exhibition “Capital Realism.” Polke’s work with old prints, news photos, and comic characters has always set his work apart, politically and emotionally, both from American and British Pop Art, and from his German contemporaries.

Sculpture：GIULIANO VANGI

Giuliano Vangi was born near Florence in 1931. He began his career concentrating on abstract studies and working with crystal and metals such as iron and steel, but moved to figurative expression when he returned to Italy in 1962 after four years in Brazil. His subject is always the human figure, and aside from stone, wood, and metal, he is just as likely to use glass and pottery, gems and gold - or any other natural material. He is currently collaborating with architect Renzo Piano(Praemium Imperiale laureate 1995) on a new work for the Church of St. Padre Pio. Robert Rauschenberg(Praemium Imperiale laureate 1998) and Arnaldo Pomodoro(Praemium Imperiale laureate 1990) are also taking part in this project.

Architecture：NORMAN FOSTER

Norman Foster was born in Manchester in 1935. After graduating from Manchester University School of Architecture and City Planning in 1961, he completed a Master’s Degree in Architecture at Yale University. His architecture is universally admired for its conceptual and structural brilliance and “high-tech” beauty - a special union of technology and aesthetics that has been polished and perfected over a lifetime. His works combine advanced technology, an ingenious geometry, attention to detail, and sensitivity to ecological considerations. Recent commissions, especially the Sackler Galleries and the Great Court of the British Museum, both in London, and the new German Parliament at the Reichstag in Berlin, add a new quality to his work. Although uncompromisingly modern in character, they demonstrate a great respect for the past.

Music：DIETRICH FISCHER-DIESKAU

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was born in Berlin in 1925. For most of his career, he divided his time fairly equally between opera and concerts. He sang Verdi and Puccini roles as readily as Mozart, Strauss and Wagner, and sang in many contemporary operas as well. Although probably most well known for his performances of traditional lieder, Fischer-Dieskau's dedicated commitment to contemporary music is noteworthy. He participated in the first performances of works by Benjamin Britten, Samuel Barber, Hans Werner Henze, Ernst Krenek, Witold Lutoslawski, Siegfried Matthus, Winfried Zillig, Gottfried von Einem. The precisely articulated accuracy of his performances, in which text and music are presented as equal partners, established standards that endure today. He is considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century.

Theatre/film：JEAN-LUC GODARD

Jean-Luc Godard was born in Paris in 1930, and grew up in Switzerland. He returned to Paris in the late 1940’s to study and during this period he met Andre Bazin, Francois Truffaut, and others who would be central to the French Nouvelle Vague movement of the 1960s. He is widely recognized as one of the filmmakers who has most influenced the modern art and language of the medium. Breathless(a bout de souffle)(1959), Godard’s first full-length film was to become an epoch-making point in motion picture history. Godard continues to explore new techniques in film and video. Godard’s works, from Breathless through his most recent, Eloge de l’Amour(2001), challenge his contemporaries and also have an immense influence on artists working in many different fields.

ANNOUNCEMENT IN PARIS

The main announcement took place, with all of the new Praemium Imperiale laureates present, at the Chateau de Versailles. Mr. Raymond Barre hosted the event on behalf of the Japan Art Association. Mr. Barre serves, along with Messers.Umberto Agnelli, Edward Heath, William Luers, Yasuhiro Nakasone, and Richard von Weizsäcker, on an advisory panel to the Japan Art Association. Japan Art Association executives and advisors attended the Paris announcement.

The Japan Art Association, Tokyo

www.praemiumimperiale.org

2001 Praemium Imperiale Laureates Announcement

2001 Praemium Imperiale Laureates

The recipients of the 13th Praemium Imperiale are:

Painting: Lee Ufan

Sculpture: Marta Pan

Architecture: Jean Nouvel

Music: Ornette Coleman

Theatre/Film: Arthur Miller

The artists are recognized and awarded for their achievements, for the impact they have had internationally on the arts, and for their role in enriching the global community. The five recipients each receive 15 million yen (c. $125,000), and a diploma and medal presented by governor of the Japan Art Association Prince Hitachi in an awards ceremony in Tokyo. The awards ceremony will be held on October 25.

The Praemium Imperiale is an annual award given by the Japan Art Association for global achievement in the arts. Since its foundation in 1989, it has become a mark of the highest international distinction. The 2001 laureates join a roster of 61 artists, including David Hockney, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Anthony Caro, Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Leonard Bernstein, Mstislav Rostropovich, Ravi Shankar, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Peter Brook.

2001 Praemium Imperiale Laureates

Painting: Lee Ufan

Japan-based Korean Lee Ufan has been a presence on the international art scene since the early 1970s. Profoundly rooted in philosophy of the East and West, his works offer his response to the basic problems of western art in the latter half of the 20th century. Lee's questioning of artistic methods and materials classes him among a large group of contemporaries; but his elementary forms and reduced processes and colors, his handling of time and space, connect him above all with Minimal Art and Conceptual Art. The genesis of his work is embedded in long meditative phases and profound concentration.

Sculpture: Marta Pan

Marta Pan has devoted her professional life to a pursuit of geometric simplicity, and to exploration of the themes of equilibrium and continuity. Her site-specific sculptures were pioneering in their attention to the overall landscape, to subtly changing light, and movements of water and wind. They were typically placed in natural environments and sculpture parks, but in recent years are found increasingly in urban settings as her interest shifts to urban scenery, and to the creation of public space environments. She has been very active outside of France, and her encounter with Japan, starting in 1969 with Floating Sculpture for the Hakone Open-Air Museum, was something like a mystical union. She now has about 25 major pieces in Japan that are appreciated for their abstract serenity and harmony with nature that perhaps recalls the essence of the traditional Japanese garden.

Architecture: Jean Nouvel

Jean Nouvel is recognized for the clarity, elegance that characterizes his work. Nouvel has created a stylistic language separate from that of modernism and post-modernism, and buildings that go beyond cultural constraints. He places great importance on harmonizing a building with its site and surroundings. Another theme unifying all of his projects is the beautiful interplay of transparency, opacity, shadow, and light. Perhaps the most well known example of this is his Institute du Monde Arab in Paris. Nouvel is considered one of the founders of the high-tech school of architecture. He uses materials such as aluminum, glass, stainless steel and concrete, but he adopts a softer, perhaps more poetic approach than his British colleagues. Nouvel's current projects include the new corporate headquarters for Dentsu Corporation at a site overlooking Tokyo Bay.

Music: Ornette Coleman

Most people think of Ornette Coleman as the revolutionary saxophonist who created "free jazz," but his explorations of the musical possibilities extend much beyond that and reveal a personal musical vocabulary free from prevailing conventions of harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic structures. Coleman's innovations, later to be known as "harmolodics," pointed out a new direction, and also established his place among a group of major 20th Century American composers such as Charlie Parker, Harry Partch, Charles Ives and John Cage. He describes Harmolodics as a system that allows every person to express their own emotions and ideas regardless of their languages, instruments, or role.

Theatre/Film: Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller has enriched the stage for over five decades. With his Death of a Salesman in 1949, Miller reached a universal audience and set a standard that marked him as a playwright for his time and for all time. The fate of the individual in society, the tragedy of the common man who loses his integrity due to social and economic pressures, the moral and political issues of our time, including the right to speak and think freely - these are the themes that have occupied Miller throughout his career. Arthur Miller continues to be a major force in world theater.

The Japan Art Association, Tokyo

www.praemiumimperiale.org

McKnight Photography Fellowship Exhibition at Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

McKnight Photography Fellowship Exhibition 

Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota

August 29 - September 22, 2000

Katherine E. Nash Gallery at University of Minnesota presents an exhibition featuring work from the 1999 University of Minnesota/McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowships for Photographers Program.

Funded by the McKnight Foundation and administered by the University of Minnesota’s Department of Art, the purpose of the McKnight Fellowship Program is to support emerging and established Minnesota photographers whose work demonstrates excellence. The program is committed to encouraging and supporting a broad range of artistic sensibilities and approaches, thus enriching the quality and diversity of photographic art in the region.

These are the six 1999 Fellows featured in the exhibition:

WING YOUNG HUIE, a native of Duluth, presents selections from his black-and-white photographs of Minnesota neighborhoods. Included are images from his Lake Street Project, currently installed along the length of this Minneapolis thoroughfare, and from smaller projects undertaken in the Red River cities of Fargo and Moorhead.

JOHN C. JOHNSTON, a 1995 recipient of an M.F.A. degree from the University of Minnesota, makes color photographs of domestic landscapes. Unassuming at first glance, these carefully controlled views transform everyday objects into enigmatic, autobiographical narratives.

LYNN LUKKAS, a native and current resident of Minneapolis, is a new media artist with a special interest in photography’s capacity for describing place and time. Her project "Oculus: Tibet" combines modern technologies and the ancient desire to see and experience new places.

ROGER MERTIN, a St. Paul resident whose photographs have been collected and presented by scores of institutions worldwide, presents the latest chapter of a decade-long project documenting North American libraries funded by Andrew Carnegie. His large format color images consider the relationships between architecture, bibliography, and whimsy.

DEIRDRE MONK describes herself as a frustrated painter. With black-and-white prints as a foundation, Monk expressively and intuitively applies color and text, both enhancing what was in the original negative and adding new material. The pieces reflect Monk’s interest in the three-way relationship between author, audience, and subject.

ALEC SOTH, another Minneapolis native and resident, used his Fellowship to support a stream-of-consciousness exploration he has titled "From Here to There." Soth likens this photographic meandering, which produced both color prints and colorful captions, to Internet surfing, wherein one flashing interest dreamily segues into another.

University of Minnesota/McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowships for Photographers are available to Minnesota photographers at any stage of their career development. Fellowship applications are reviewed and funding decisions made by a review panel of three photography professionals from outside the state. Fellowships are awarded for a twelve-month period.

The exhibition will travel to Winona State University in November, and to Bemidji State University in January. An illustrated publication, available for no charge, accompanies the exhibition.

1998 McKnight Photography Fellows

Sheila Farrell ~ Inna Valin ~ David Goldes ~ Wayne Gudmundson ~ Richard Sennott ~ Keith Holmes

The Katherine E. Nash Gallery is located on the lower concourse of Willey Hall on the University of Minnesota’s west bank campus, Minneapolis.

www.mcknightphoto.umn.edu