2009 Joan Miró Prize

This past May 4, the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, with the sponsorship of the Caixa Girona Foundation, granted the 2009 Joan Miró Prize to Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. The Prize consists of a purse of 70,000 Euros and recognizes Rist¿s contribution to the contemporary art scene. The jury panel for the event included contemporary art experts such as Ida Gianelli, president of the l¿Azienda Speciale Palaexpo; Alfred Pacquement, director of the National Museum of Modern Art, Georges Pompidou Centre; Vicente Todolí, director of the Tate Modern; Poul Erik Tøjner, director of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; Rosa Maria Malet, director of the Joan Miró Foundation;, and Arcadi Calzada, president of the Caixa Girona Foundation, among others. They chose Rist because her audiovisual installations conveying psychic and aesthetical landscapes ¿ as in Sip My Ocean of 1996 ¿ make the spectator ¿penetrate the deepest stratus of the individual and collective conscience, while often remaining between both in a powerful and also elusive manner.¿ It is additionally important to point out the interactions of her work with the architectural spaces, as in the piece entitled Homo Sapiens Sapiens, a video projection performed on the ceiling of the San Stae Church in Venice in 2005. The same occurs with works that utilize the artist¿s own body as the medium, such as in I¿m Not the Girl Who Misses Much, of 1986, created during Rist¿s beginning of her artistic career. During the summer of 2010, Pipilotti Rist will present an exhibition at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona and another at the Caixa Girona Cultural Centre -Fontana d'Or.