LONDON.- Frieze Art Fair announced that the winner of The Cartier Award 2008 is Cuban artist, Wilfredo Prieto. Prieto, based in Barcelona, is a talented young conceptual artist whose works often take the form of site-specific installations. His winning proposal was chosen from over 400 applications submitted by artists across the world.

For Frieze Art Fair 2008, sponsored by Deutsche Bank for the fifth year, Prieto will present Pond, a site-specific installation of over 100 oil drums. The mirrored pond-like effect created by the liquid in the drums will be punctured by the presence and movement of a frog. The work will be a beautiful and poetic reflection on the current international obsession with accumulation and growth.

The Cartier Award is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading art awards. It allows an emerging artist from outside the UK to realise a major project at Frieze Art Fair as part of the influential Frieze Projects programme curated by Neville Wakefield. Wakefield, commenting on the announcement, said: “Wilfredo Prieto stands out amongst his peers for creating art that levitates the ordinary. With great economy of means he addresses issues of sculptural and geo-political accumulation in ways that are at once provocative, charming and poetic.”

The Cartier Award forms an exciting and highly visible element of Cartier’s long-standing commitment to supporting contemporary art. Grazia Quaroni, one of the selection panel, and curator of the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art added: “Wilfredo Prieto's installations reinvent reality and create new global landscapes for a better world. The poverty of means and the minimal structures he always uses are essential to obtain a powerful synthesis of a visionary urban context, strong, lyrical and human-scale based.”

In 2008, Gasworks, an outstanding studio complex in London, will host the residency for the second year.

Wilfredo Prieto was born in 1978 and graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte de la Universidad de Habana in 2002. His work has been exhibited at SMAK (Ghent) in 2008, the 52nd Venice Biennial in 2007, at the Kadist Art Foundation and Apolitical at the Louvre Museum, Paris as well as the VIII Havana Biennal in 2006 and in A moment of Silence at the Dia Art Foundation in New York in 2003. Prieto was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 2006.