COLOGNE.- In 2017 the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig in Cologne is awarding the Wolfgang Hahn Prize to Trisha Donnelly. Henriette Reker, the mayor of the City of Cologne, presented the prize. Suzanne Cotter, director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto and the guest juror in 2017, gave the laudation.

Awarded annually since 1994, the prize aims to: on the one hand, it honors artists for their internationally recognized oeuvre. On the other hand, the prize is linked with the acquisition of a key work by the artist for the collection of the Museum Ludwig. In addition, the recipient is honored with an exhibition and a publication.

The Trisha Donnelly Exhibition: 2017 Wolfgang Hahn Prize
Trisha Donnelly has selected the large hall on the lower level of the Museum Ludwig for her instal-lation. The space is over eight meters high and has an area of some 375 square meters. Trisha Don-nelly has brought together several works in the hall, which a high wall divides into two spaces, to create an overall composition.

The Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig is acquiring a work from the installation for the collection of the Museum Ludwig.

Central to Donnelly’s works is that she decidedly withdraws them from the routine of interpretation, attribution, and definition. As a rule, there are hardly any press releases, texts, or publications; the viewer searches in vain for work titles. Donnelly’s pieces, with all their peculiarity and individual properties, exist at a specific site and can only be experienced there, in person. In this day and age, her approach is particularly remarkable, presenting an alternative to what is now a typical global hyperpresence due to digitization and social media. Viewers must rely completely on their own perception, activating their imagination, memory, and interpretative abilities, sharpening their powers of observation and senses, immersing themselves in what Donnelly has created expressly for this site, this space.

This also applies to the current installation, on which Donnelly worked intensively over several weeks.

Publication
Suzanne Cotter’s printed laudation for Trisha Donnelly as well as an essay on the collector Wolf-gang Hahn by Barbara Engelbach are being published by the Verlag der Buchhandlung König in Cologne. Editor: Carla Cugini, Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig. Price: 10 eu-ros.