Top art prize goes stateside
Artist Vija Celmins from the United States has been awarded Europe's most valuable art accolade, the Roswitha Haftmann Prize.
The SFr150,000 ($139,000) prize for 2009 went to Celmins for outstanding artistic achievement in different media, the Zurich-based Roswitha Haftmann Foundation announced on Monday.
“The artist has a masterly and uncanny way of exploiting widely differing artistic media to the utmost advantage for her creative purposes,” the foundation said.
Celmins used oils and charcoal in both earlier works portraying a world destabilized by war and a photogravure technique in later pieces focusing on nature.
The Latvian-born artist has lived and worked in New York since 1981. Her work has featured in a number of group exhibitions in Europe since the 1990s.
Art dealer Roswitha Haftmann left most of her fortune to the foundation, which awards prizes every one to three years on the basis of the outstanding artistic significance of an individual’s work.
The winner is selected by a board that includes the directors of the Kunstmuseum Bern, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Kunsthaus Zurich.
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