Camille Henrot wins the inaugural Edvard Munch Art Award
The Munch Museum
Oslo, Norway
The Munch Museum is pleased to announce that Camille Henrot has been named the inaugural winner of The Edvard Munch Art Award.
As the recipient of the Award, Henrot will receive a monetary prize of 500,000 NOK (apx. 65,000 USD) funded by Statoil ASA, an exhibition of her work at the Munch Museum, and a residency at Edvard Munch’s studio at Ekely in Oslo for up to three months.
The jury deciding the inaugural Edvard Munch Art Award winner was comprised of jury chair Alfred Pacquement, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Robert Storr, Hou Hanru, and Solveig Øvstebø. All members of the jury were appointed by Stein Olav Heinrichsen, Director of The Munch Museum.
The jury’s statement of the recipient: “Through a number of projects and exhibitions of high quality and diversity, Camille Henrot has within the five last years proven herself as an exceptionally talented and original artist. With her work Grosse Fatigue at the Venice Biennale 2013, she gained widespread international attention, and since then, she has continued to make thought-provoking new work.
In her artistic practice, Camille Henrot uses a variety of different mediums, including traditional artistic techniques as well as new technologies. Seemingly effortlessly, she moves between painting, film, photography, drawing, sculpture and video to create intriguing, playful and thought-provoking works, resulting in comprehensive collages and installations.
In her work, Henrot deconstructs totalizing and universal systems of representation, knowledge and history, and thereby raises political questions of difference through anthropological research on a wide range of topics, such as ethnicity, identity, geography, gender, sexuality, biology, mythology and literature.
The jury finds Henrot’s artistic practice particularly significant, in the sense that she sheds light on fundamental epistemological questions of our time, where knowledge is continuously diffused, reproduced and diversified through an impenetrable web of information and communication. Henrot is an artist in the process of developing her artistic project and career, and she is experiencing a growing international attention to her art. The jury believes that Henrot has a very strong potential to develop further in the years to come, and will follow her future work with great anticipation.”
The inaugural recipient was announced during Art Basel Miami on December 4, at a reception at The Shelborne Hotel in Miami Beach co-hosted by the Royal Norwegian Consulate General in New York and the Office of Contemporary Art in Oslo, Norway. An award ceremony will be held in the recipient’s honor on Edvard Munch’s birthday, December 12, at the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway. The Award will be presented by Her Majesty Queen Sonja of Norway.
The Edvard Munch Art Award is an international biannual mark of recognition bestowed on a contemporary artist. As an acknowledgement of Edvard Munch’s historical significance and enduring relevance to contemporary culture, the award aims to promote the development of young and talented artists within the visual arts. The Award is owned, controlled and administered by the Munch Museum with partial funding from Statoil and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
About Camille Henrot
Born in 1978 in Paris, New York-based Camille Henrot is one of the most dynamic artists working today. Her encyclopedic knowledge, limitless interests in various disciplines, and diverse artistic practices have created some of the most talked about films, paintings, and sculptures of the last few years. A 2013 fellowship at the Smithsonian resulted in her film Grosse Fatigue, a benchmark work for which she was awarded the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Developing on themes from the film, Henrot’s exhibition The Pale Fox was first shown at London’s Chisenhale Gallery in 2014 and travelled to Kunsthal Charlottenburg, Copenhagen, Bétonsalon, Paris, and the Westfällischer Kunstverein, Munster. A catalogue for the exhibition entitled Elephant Child is scheduled for release in December 2015.
Henrot has forthcoming exhibitions scheduled at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Fondazione Memmo, Rome. She has had one-person exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin; New Orleans Museum of Art; Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris; and Jeu de Paume, Paris. She is the recipient of the 2014 Nam Jun Paik Award.
About The Munch Museum
The Munch Museum is an art museum in Oslo, Norway, dedicated to the life and work of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. It is one of Scandinavia’s most important museums. The collection consists of approximately 1,100 paintings, close to 18,000 prints (depicting more than 700 different motifs), 7,500 drawings and watercolors, as well as six sculptures, nearly 500 printing plates, and 2,240 books, notebooks, documents, photographs, art tools, accessories and pieces of furniture that Munch bequeathed to the City of Oslo upon his death. The Munch Museum will move to a new building designed by Spanish architects Herreros Arquitectos in the harbor area of Bjørvika near Oslo’s Opera house in 2019. On the occasion of the new museum building, the Munch Museum is currently developing its program and artistic profile, which will include a strong focus on contemporary art. The Edvard Munch Art Award is one of several initiatives in this regard.
