Kathrin Affentranger, Winner of the Art Prize 2012
 |
 |
 |
| JPG (2,10 MB) |
No title, 2012
Acryl on Wood
173 x 173 x 150 cm
JPG (2,21 MB) |
JPG (2,32 MB) |
The Nationale Suisse sponsorship award, launched in 2004, is intended to give a helping hand to graduates in visual arts and media arts from the Swiss universities of applied sciences. It emphasizes the long-term commitment of the company to Swiss art. Artists at the beginning of their careers are specifically targeted for this sponsorship. Nationale Suisse’s own collection of contemporary Swiss art is considered one of the most important collections of its kind. While this collection focuses primarily on painting, drawing and photography, the sponsorship award for young artists is deliberately broader in scope. It is therefore intended specifically to provide a platform for the new ideas and art forms of the next generation of artists.
The Works of Kathrin Affentranger
Kathrin Affentranger (born in 1987), who has been chosen by an independent jury of experts as the winner of the Nationale Suisse Art Prize 2012, graduated from the University of Arts in Bern. Her work oscillates between drawing, sculpture and installation. Her sculptural pieces, created from simple shapes and materials, look at first glance to be in a classic minimalist style. They are fragile forms drawn in space, which have a moment of instability inherent within them and therefore a potential for disintegration. The artist uses her body to determine the scale of the work, and so she creates a physical connection with the observer, who is invited to move around in order to see the work as a whole and discover the multitude of other potential sculptures within it when viewed from different perspectives.
The Art Prize consists of prize money of CHF 15,000 plus the opportunity for the artist to exhibit her work at the international art fair LISTE, the Young Art Fair in Basel.
The Jury 2012
The members of the jury for this year’s Art Prize were: Nikola Dietrich (Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Basel), Jean-Paul Felley (Co-Director of the Centre culturel suisse de Paris), Fanni Fetzer (Director of the Lucerne Museum of Art) and Helen Hirsch (Director of the Thun Museum of Art).
The judging took place as part of the annual art exhibition “Plattform” at the ewz-Unterwerk Selnau in Zurich. A selection of works by the most promising graduates from eight Swiss universities of applied sciences is shown there.