SKOVVEJ .- The ARKEN Museum of Modern Art has awarded its ninth annual art prize of DKK 100,000. This year’s recipient is Jeppe Hein. In addition, two travel grants of DKK 50,000 have been awarded, to Astrid Kruse Jensen and Emil Westman Hertz. The ARKEN PRIZE and the ARKEN TRAVEL GRANT are donated by Annie & Otto Johs. Detlefs’ Philanthropic Foundation.
Playful and unpredictable
ARKEN director Christian Gether on this year’s prize-winner: “Jeppe Hein is awarded the ARKEN PRIZE 2014 for his ability to create fantastic and unpredictable art experiences in a playful and intelligent way. Being in the company of Hein’s art activates our senses through wonder and interaction. His work thematizes such basic values as presence, joy, dialogue and reflection.”
The Danish artist Jeppe Hein has made his name in Denmark and internationally with playful and surprising sculptures and installations. Operating in the intersection of sculpture, architecture and technological innovation, Hein incorporates the presence of the viewer into his works. This is apparent in ARKEN’s Spiral Labyrinth, which sets the space as well as our image of ourselves in motion, unsettling us until we almost lose our footing. That is also the case with Long Modified Bench, a series of unconventional benches that twist and wind, inviting dialogue and social interaction. Hein’s aesthetic is not just surprising and humorous, it is also highly thought provoking.
Dream visions and secret worlds
The aim of the ARKEN TRAVEL GRANT is to give the recipients an opportunity to travel, view exhibitions abroad, do research, form networks and exchange ideas and knowledge. This year’s travel grants are awarded to the artists Astrid Kruse Jensen and Emil Westman Hertz.
Astrid Kruse Jensen has worked in photography throughout her career. Dream visions, fantastical tales and painterly atmospheres are features of her art. Astrid Kruse Jensen’s works alternate between seductive and ominous, sharp and blurry, light and dark, beautiful and melancholy. Works like Constructing a Memory and Within the Landscape send the viewer on an emotional journey through memory that is both universal and entirely personal. Astrid Kruse Jensen is receiving the ARKEN TRAVEL GRANT 2014 for her extraordinary ability to stage familiar and eternal conditions through photography.
Emil Westman Hertz creates moving narratives and secret worlds in the intersection of ethnography, museology and biology. In Coffin, which is in ARKEN’s collection, he examines human vanity in a way that is both brutal and poetic. The coffin was made in Ghana, where it is a custom for people to design their own coffins. Emil Westman Hertz expresses himself in many media but mainly in drawing, sculpture and installation. His materials include pillboxes, beeswax, animal bones and seashells.
Emil Westman Hertz is awarded the ARKEN TRAVEL GRANT 2014 because in his works he makes us conscious of the transience of life, the natural decay of any living organism. His art contains a rare fusion of poignant vulnerability and irrepressible life force.
Past recipients of the ARKEN PRIZE
2013: Carsten Höller
2012: Anselm Reyle
2011: Pascale Marthine Tayou
2010: Bharti Kher
2009: Olafur Eliasson
2008: John Bock
2007: Tim Noble and Sue Webster
2006: Elmgreen & Dragset
Jeppe Hein (b. 1974) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1997 and followed up with two years at the Städel Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt. Hein has presented solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions at major art museums around the world, including PS1 in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. Hein currently works in Berlin.
Astrid Kruse Jensen (b. 1975) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Akademie in Amsterdam and the Glasgow School of Art. She lives and works in Copenhagen.
Emil Westman Hertz (b. 1978) studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and the Mau Maus School of Fine Arts in Lisbon. He lives and works in Copenhagen and Gudhjem, Denmark.
