AwardJuly 24, 2023
Cildo Meireles was granted the Roswitha Haftmann Prize
Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles has won the Roswitha Haftmann Prize, becoming the first Latin American artist to do so since its founding in 2001. The award, which grants 150,000 Swiss francs with no-strings-attached, is named after the late Swiss dealer Roswitha Haftmann and administered by Kunsthaus Zürich. It is Europe’s largest Prize and is typically given in recognition of an artist’s body of work over a lifetime.
“The jury was impressed by the artist’s exceptional talent for involving his audience both intellectually and emotionally with politically charged and aesthetically fascinating works,” said Yilmaz Dziewior, a Roswitha Haftmann Foundation board member.
Meireles’s multi-layered work is poetic, conceptual, critical, and socially relevant. It covers a range of genres, including sculptures, installations, and performances. One of the younger members of a generation that transformed Brazilian art in the late 1960s, along with Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, he is especially known for his highly sensory, immersive installations, many of which express opposition to political repression and exploitation of the unethical extraction of resources.
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1948, Meireles, over a six-decade-long career, was initially making works on paper; he became fascinated by the concept of the ephemeral and the non-object and its relation to space and the viewer. At that point, he turned to sculpture and installation. One of his earliest projects is the 1968’s “Virtual Spaces,” which featured environments that looked like corners in rooms. Among the works for which he is best known are Red Shift, 1967–84, a three-room bloodred installation frequently cast as political art by critics but characterized by Meireles as emblematic of both a chromatic and physical shift, or displacement; the series “Insertions into Ideological Circuits,” 1970, in which he scrawled anti-capitalist messages across objects such as Coca-Cola bottles and Brazilian currency to comment on consumerism and the circulation and exchange of information; and Babel, a 2001 installation comprising a massive tower of radios playing simultaneously different programs in various languages.
The Prize honors and foregrounds the winner’s life’s work; it was originally the initiative of Roswitha Haftmann (1924–1998), a language teacher. Cildo Meireles is the 21st recipient of the award. Previous winners include Walter De Maria, Maria Lassnig, Robert Ryman, Cindy Sherman, Robert Frank, and VALIE EXPORT. The Prize will be presented on 22 September 2023 before an invited audience at the Kunsthaus Zürich.
For further information, visit: www.roswithahaftmann-foundation.com
“The jury was impressed by the artist’s exceptional talent for involving his audience both intellectually and emotionally with politically charged and aesthetically fascinating works,” said Yilmaz Dziewior, a Roswitha Haftmann Foundation board member.
Meireles’s multi-layered work is poetic, conceptual, critical, and socially relevant. It covers a range of genres, including sculptures, installations, and performances. One of the younger members of a generation that transformed Brazilian art in the late 1960s, along with Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, he is especially known for his highly sensory, immersive installations, many of which express opposition to political repression and exploitation of the unethical extraction of resources.
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1948, Meireles, over a six-decade-long career, was initially making works on paper; he became fascinated by the concept of the ephemeral and the non-object and its relation to space and the viewer. At that point, he turned to sculpture and installation. One of his earliest projects is the 1968’s “Virtual Spaces,” which featured environments that looked like corners in rooms. Among the works for which he is best known are Red Shift, 1967–84, a three-room bloodred installation frequently cast as political art by critics but characterized by Meireles as emblematic of both a chromatic and physical shift, or displacement; the series “Insertions into Ideological Circuits,” 1970, in which he scrawled anti-capitalist messages across objects such as Coca-Cola bottles and Brazilian currency to comment on consumerism and the circulation and exchange of information; and Babel, a 2001 installation comprising a massive tower of radios playing simultaneously different programs in various languages.
The Prize honors and foregrounds the winner’s life’s work; it was originally the initiative of Roswitha Haftmann (1924–1998), a language teacher. Cildo Meireles is the 21st recipient of the award. Previous winners include Walter De Maria, Maria Lassnig, Robert Ryman, Cindy Sherman, Robert Frank, and VALIE EXPORT. The Prize will be presented on 22 September 2023 before an invited audience at the Kunsthaus Zürich.
For further information, visit: www.roswithahaftmann-foundation.com
