Since last year, artists who have excelled in the realm of contemporary sculpture will be recognized by the Dallas-based Nasher Sculpture Center. The emerging winner will take home a whopping $100,000 in cash and last year saw Doris Salcedo, the Colombian-born sculptor grab the prize in its first year. The prize, the first of its kind in contemporary sculpture, will bring recognition to the artists who have contributed immensely to the world of sculpture, as well as elevating it in the public consciousness.
This year, the judges settled for one of France’s finest artists, Pierre Huyghe. Pierre is not unfamiliar with being recognized in the world of art. Among the various awards he has won in the past are the Kurst Schwitters Prize in 2015 and the Roswitha Haftmann Award in 2013, among many others. This is due to his exemplary contributions to the world of art.
Pierre is exceptionally gifted, and actually, he’s among the few artists who exhibit a special talent that goes beyond conventional sculpturing. He’s known to integrate various disciplines, bringing together heterogeneous materials and unconventional materials into a practice going beyond the total of its multifarious parts.
Pierre’s work in sculpture spreads wide into almost every other discipline including music, dance, cinema and theatre. It touches on philosophy and biology, branching off to other facets of life like rituals, microorganisms and other living things like dogs and bees to create a unique sculptural experience. With such a gift, this recognition was well in order.
His work best describes relational aesthetics, which is a theory of an art that relies on human interactions instead of the creation of actual objects, as Nicolas Bourriaud puts it.
The jury that picked him for the top prize was comprised of the top echelons in this field. This includes Steve A., the senior curator at the National Gallery of Art, Phyllida Barlow, a museum director, Nicholas Serota, chair of the arts council of England and the founding director of Nasher Sculpture Centre, Nicholas Serota, among others.
They were quick to note Pierre’s efforts in expanding the parameters of sculpture by his creativity to encompass a number of materials and disciplines.
In a statement written by Jeremy Strick, the Nasher Sculpture Centre Director, it was noted how Huyghe’s (as he’s popularly referred to) canniness and imaginative demeanor have managed to communicate a deep message mimetic to life, especially while dealing with ecological issues facing the planet today and tying it to the ancient purpose of sculpture.
Since the nineties, Huyghe has perfected the art of time-based situations and explored the finer points of the exhibition process. He has been diversifying ever since; recently he has brought about self-generating systems including living entities and artifacts, where indeterminate rhythm and emergency exists beyond our presence.