While it was already crystal clear that this year’s winner of the Preis der Nationalgalerie (National Gallery Prize) would be a women (for the first time ever, an all-girl shortlist was featured), we now know who it is: Polish-born, Berlin-based artist Agnieszka Polska.
One of Germany’s most prestigious art prizes, it is awarded biannually to an artist under the age of 40 who lives and works in Berlin. Polska was announced last Friday to have won the juried prize, while the winner of the audience award will be announced in January 2018.
Although the award offers no prize money, it one of the most significant European art awards and goes along with a solo exhibition for the winner in one of the state museums the following year.
The 2015 edition jury and audience prize went to performance artist Anne Imhof, who represented the German pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennial with her performance “Angst”.
Polska is known for her digital collages, connecting cartoons with photographies, text and sound. She selected two new films to be included in the final exhibition, which deal with moral and socially relevant topics – this time depicting the sun as a helpless observer of human behavior in a collapsing world in “What the sun has seen”.
photos vis culture.pl, the artist, Goethe Institute
