LONDON.- The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation announced Oliver Beer as the winner of the Daiwa Foundation Art Prize 2015.

The Prize offers a unique opportunity for a British artist to gain exposure to Japan’s visual arts sector. Oliver, who was shortlisted for the prize alongside Julie Brook and Mikhail Karikis, is now invited to exhibit at the Aoyama | Meguro Gallery in Tokyo in Autumn 2015. In addition, he receives a participation fee of £5000 and a period of support and introduction to key individuals and organisations in the Japanese contemporary art world.

Jason James, Director General of The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation comments: ‘We hope that, in awarding the Daiwa Foundation Art Prize, we will not only open new doors for British artists in Japan but create valuable partnerships and opportunities for the future.’

Oliver Beer was born in 1985 in the United Kingdom. He studied composition before attending the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford. His work has been the subject of many screenings as well as solo and group exhibitions, notably at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; WIELS, Brussels; Museum of Contemporary Art MAC Lyon; Modern Art Oxford; Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris; the Palais de Tokyo and the Lyon Biennale; the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; and MoMA PS1, New York.

In this exhibition, Oliver Beer’s body of work interrogates the physical properties and sentimental values of material objects and cultural narratives. In doing so, he casts doubt on the objectivity of perception. On display are a series of powerfully illusory wall installations, in which ‘dissected’ objects, halved long-ways, are embedded in plaster plaques that lie flush with the wall. Among the series is a work with coloured pencils, RGB (2014), which links directly to his main exhibit, a video entitled Reanimation – Snow White (2014). Never before shown in the UK, this film loop is a kaleidoscopic assemblage of over 500 images, hand-coloured by French school children, reimagining a sequence from Walt Disney’s 1938 cartoon. With a soundtrack pieced together from archived recordings of the film’s original songs, this film calls upon the universal mythology of Snow White to express the power of the collective imagination.

The Prize was presented at a private awards ceremony on June 11th by the distinguished panel: Hideki Aoyama, Gallery Director, Aoyama | Meguro Gallery, Tokyo; Richard Deacon, artist; Mami Kataoka, Chief Curator, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Chris Orr RA, artist; and Jonathan Watkins, Director of Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.

This will be the third exhibition of the Daiwa Foundation Art Prize, an award offered to British artists resident in the UK who have not previously exhibited in Japan. The two previous Prizes were awarded to Marcus Coates in 2009, who had a solo exhibition at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, and to Haroon Mirza in 2012, whose solo show was held at SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, Tokyo.

An exhibition of work by Oliver and the two shortlisted artists, Julie Brook and Mikhail Karikis is on display at Daiwa Foundation Japan House from 12th June – 17th July 2015.