Art

Visual artist Remy Jungerman will be awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art 2022. The jury praises the artist for the way he interweaves the cultures of the countries that define him: Suriname, the Netherlands, and the United States. By using geometric patterns and horizontals composed of panels varying of length, width, and colour, Jungerman creates a unique style and an extensive layering in his work. This form and connection of traditions offers the audience a new visual language that initiates a dialogue between disparate cultures.

The Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art is the biggest visual art prize in the Netherlands. The award was established in 1988 by Alfred H. Heineken to honour and encourage top talent in the arts in their development and to enhance their international prominence as artists. The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences is responsible for the nomination and selection process. Previous laureates include Ansuya Blom (2020) and Erik van Lieshout (2018).

Jungerman creates sculptures, paintings, and installations in which he combines elements from different cultures. Materials, traditions, and rituals from Africa and North and South America form the basis of his work and he incorporates them in a modernist way. Specifically, he draws much inspiration from the Maroons of Suriname, descendants of escaped enslaved people. He uses textiles from the Winti religion, which Maroons, among other beliefs and practices, adhere to, and kaolin, a porcelain clay used in this culture during rituals to purify bodies and objects. In his large installations, he also uses other materials from rituals. He wants to use the aesthetics of these materials to tell new stories. 

Jury praises combination of different traditions
The jury, chaired by Patricia Pisters, professor of Film Studies at the University of Amsterdam, is impressed by the body of work that Jungerman has steadily built up. In his installations, sculptures, paintings, and prints, he repeatedly manages to combine visual elements from different traditions in original ways. Although visually abstract, the jury describes his art as simultaneously physical and grounded. For example, in his work Visiting Deities, an installation around a long table of kaolin-treated blue-and-white and black-and-white chequered textiles, he uses Dutch river clay and water samples from the Amstel, Hudson, and Cottica rivers. Rivers on the three continents between which Jungerman travels. This layering makes the viewer think, according to the jury. Jungerman explains: ‘I thought it was important to install this table at the Venice Biennale. The Giardini, where the Biennale is held, has always been a glorification of the colonial past. There, all the rich countries could exhibit the wealth they had amassed from free labour through their colonies. As someone who comes from former colonial territory, I wanted to use the table to purify the space, and in doing so, to start the conversation.’ 

Follow-up research into Gee’s Bend quilts
Jungerman will receive €100,000 funded by a private fund, the Dr. A.H. Heineken Foundation for the Arts; half of this is earmarked for a publication and/or exhibition. The award will allow Jungerman to broaden his field of work. For example, in the United States he plans to research Gee’s Bend quilts, a type of blanket made by women from the isolated African-American community of Gee’s Bend. They use similar geometries to the early Maroon shoulder cloths from the previous century. Jungerman wants to discover what the similarities are and, in doing so, tell the great story of that geometric journey from the African continent to North and South America.

About Remy Jungerman
Remy Jungerman (1959, Moengo, Suriname) is a visual artist. He studied at the Academy for Higher Art and Culture Education in Paramaribo in Suriname and continued his education at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. He was an artist-in-residence at Art Omi in New York in 2013 and at the International Studio & Curatorial Program, also in New York, in 2018. Jungerman represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in 2019 with the exhibition The Measurement of Presence, with artist Iris Kensmil. Jungerman has exhibited frequently at home and abroad, including at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Prospect 3, the New Orleans Contemporary Art Triennial, the Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, the Brooklyn Museum in New York, and the Havana Biennial. In late 2021 and early 2022, he curated a major solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, titled Behind the Forest.

The international jury of the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art 2020 has awarded the prize to visual artist Ansuya Blom. She will receive 100,000 euros, half of which is intended for a publication and/or exhibition. The jury described Ansuya Blom’s work as intimate, engaging and poetic.

Artist
Ansuya Blom (Groningen 1956) lives and works in Amsterdam. She studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and Ateliers ‘63 in Haarlem. Blom has been working in various art forms, including drawing, painting, photography, film, text, collage and sculpture, since the late seventies. In 1981 she received the Royal Award for Modern Painting. Her films have been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin, IDFA Amsterdam and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her work can be found in the collections of museums, including the EYE Filmmuseum, Tate Modern and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. She has had solo exhibitions at the Camden Arts Centre in London, the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and recently the Casco Art Institute in Utrecht. Blom also holds a master’s degree in psychoanalysis from Middlesex University in London and is an associate member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research in London.

Ansuya Blom is an advisor at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and was a guest advisor at art institutions in the United Kingdom, South Korea, Suriname and Indonesia in 2019. She is a regular speaker at public lectures, and in interviews and panel sessions, most recently at the Nola Hatterman Institute in Suriname, the EYE Film Museum, the Casco Art Institute and De Appel.

Jury report
Her work does not clamour for attention, nor does Ansuya Blom herself. She chooses to stay in the background and lets her work subtly penetrate. For more than forty years Blom has been steadily working on an oeuvre that explores the boundaries of the inner world of experience. In films, drawings, paintings, installations and texts, she always manages to get under the skin and portrays humankind’s struggle with itself and the environment in an engaging and poetic way. 

Blom’s work radiates a great social and societal commitment. With her interest in psychoanalysis and psychiatry, her work offers a space for the voices of those who are often not heard: the marginalised or forgotten people. The artist asks critical questions about the position of the individual, collective and society. At a time when much debate is polarised, her work is characterised by subtlety. Blom offers a look into the human soul, in all its fragile vulnerability, and does so authentically and autonomously. 

The jury also praised her generous attitude in the Dutch art world, where Blom repeatedly takes on the task of mentoring young artists. The Heineken Prize for Art comes at an important time, during which a new generation of artists and curators is rediscovering Blom’s oeuvre and becoming very interested in it. The prize increases this momentum and will enable Blom to make new connections.

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Dutch visual artist Erik van Lieshout has been selected as laureate of the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art 2018. The jury for the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art has praised Erik van Lieshout’s work for its radical, personal and confrontational nature.

Art
In his unique, tragicomic style, Van Lieshout puts his finger on what ails society. His work never flags, continues to grow and is pure: he is not out to preach. He enters into dialogue with groups who others often give a wide berth: ghetto-dwellers, junkies, drifters, and right-wing or left-wing extremists. He raises questions about drugs, sex, violence and overregulation. There is no taboo or danger that Erik van Lieshout tries to avoid; on the contrary, he makes a beeline for them and tries to find a dialogue.

Artist
Erik van Lieshout (born in Deurne in 1968) lives and works in Rotterdam. He studied at the Academy of Art and Design in ‘s Hertogenbosch and Ateliers ’63 in Haarlem (1990-1992). His work consists of drawings, collages, sculptures and videos, often combined into multimedia installations. He always features in his own videos.
 ‘Erik van Lieshout explodes into our consciousness,’ was how one reviewer recently described Van Lieshout’s exhibition I am in Heaven (Anton Kern Gallery, 2015). As a Manifesta 10 artist (2014), he spent two months overhauling the basement of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, along with the seventy or so stray cats that live there. He sketched and filmed the process. While it appears to document the overhaul, Van Lieshout’s film The Basement (2014) is really about Russia under Putin, gay rights, the seizure of the Crimea, censorship and Pussy Riot. This short film was projected in a 50-metre-long tunnel made of plywood and carpet and lined with copies of politically charged sketches and photographs of the cats in the basement. Clips of this work reappear in his longer film WORK (2015). Viewers are overwhelmed by a whirlwind of images, impressions, snippets of text, animations, crudely fashioned props, raw charcoal drawings and film images shot with a handheld camera that show Van Lieshout talking to himself and others about idealism, utopia, harsh reality and the position that an uncompromising artist tries to claim in all of it. His work can be found in Dutch and international private and museum collections, including the MoMa in New York. In 2003, he was selected to be the Dutch entry for the Venice Biennale.

Article
— Interview with Erik van Lieshout in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

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Dutch visual artist Yvonne Dröge Wendel has been awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art 2016. The international jury has praised Wendel’s work for its originality, inventiveness and vitality.

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The drive behind her work is tangible and visible in her playful, philosophical studies of how objects influence human behaviour. One notable example is the artwork Black Ball, a large felted ball measuring 3.5 metres in diameter, that the public moves down streets and alleyways and through gates and doorways. People respond with visible enjoyment to the ball and interact spontaneously with it. In her PhD research project, she is examining the relational and performative abilities of things, a theme that touches on present-day questions about our relationship to the world around us. By awarding the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art to Yvonne Dröge Wendel, the jury is emphasising the potential of art to change our perception and experience of the world.

Artist
Yvonne Dröge Wendel (born in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1961) lives and works in Amsterdam. She trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie  in Amsterdam and was an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (1993-1994) and Delfina Studios in London (2002-2003). She is currently working on a PhD artistic research project at the University of Twente. She is also head of the department of fine arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. She publishes art books, features frequently in solo and group exhibitions, and engages on a regular basis with the public in public spaces. In 1994 she won the second Prix de Rome to be awarded in the fine arts and theatre.

More information
— http://www.yvonnedrogewendel.nl/

Article
— Interview with Yvonne Dröge Wendel in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

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Wendelien van Oldenborgh, a visual artist who lives and works in Rotterdam, has been awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art 2014.
According to the jury, Van Oldenborgh occupies a unique place in the Dutch artistic landscape because of the way in which she addresses modern-day social issues in exceptional, authoritative and multi-layered works. Van Oldenborgh has an impressive track record, having exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial (2010), the Istanbul Biennial (2009) and other internationally renowned art fairs.

Art
Van Oldenborgh’s work accesses parts of our reality that remain in the background in other areas of public life. We see a world that is often hidden from view on television and in the papers. A somewhat older example is Sound Track Stage, part of the series A Certain Brazilianness (2006). Here, she set up the representatives of two subcultures, “Gabber” and “Hip Hop”, for a musical and verbal confrontation. The confrontation unfolded at Rotterdam’s Boijmans van Beuningen Museum and was shot professionally and screened as it took place. Both during the public recording session and in the film, she avoided a black-and-white depiction of these subcultures but showed them to be complex systems in which similarities overlap subtly with differences.
Van Oldenborgh has a unique ability to build a dialogue between a precisely selected social or historical theme, a space, and a film or photograph. This is very clear in her more recent work, for example Après la reprise, la prise (2009), in which she focuses on two employees of an old French jeans factory who are reinventing themselves as actors. The two women tell their life story to a group of vocational school students who are about to graduate. The work consists of slides and audio clips documenting their encounter and projected in a fit-for-purpose space. The two generations of workers brought together in sound and image raise questions about industrial and demographic shifts. Van Oldenborgh compares and contrasts the ethnically mixed group of pupils with the older, white employees, whose work in the theatre has unexpectedly landed them in the “creative” industry. Their meeting unfolds into an interaction in which images and sound are not there to illustrate a story but to enter into dialogue with each other. Images and sound assume an importance beyond the story. The challenge for the viewer is not only to comprehend the world (as narrative), but – by looking – to understand a familiar story in a new way. It is precisely this subtlety that reveals Van Oldenborgh’s unique artistry.

Artist
Wendelien van Oldenborgh (born in 1962) studied at Goldsmiths College, London. Before settling in Rotterdam, she lived and worked in Germany and Belgium. In addition to her artistic work, she teaches various Master’s degree courses, including at the Dutch Art Institute / ArtEZ (Master of Fine Arts) and the Royal Academy of Art (Artistic Research Master’s programme). She previously received the Hendrik Chabot Prize for Fine Arts (2011) and the Marian McMahon Award (2010).

More information
— Personal page at website Dutch Art Institute

Article
— Interview with Wendelien van Oldenborgh in De Groene Amsterdammer (Dutch)

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Works of art

Peter Struycken has been awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art 2012 for the methodical way in which he has used shapes, colours and processes in his innovative and appealing works of art for the past fifty years.
Everyone in the Netherlands is familiar with the work of the Dutch artist Peter Struycken, if only because his portrait of Queen Beatrix, which is made of digital shifted dots, still graces numerous Dutch postage stamps some thirty years after he created it.
Computer-generated images are common now, making it difficult to imagine how innovative and pioneering Struycken was when he first used computers to create works of art in the late 1960s, and when he chose in 1981 to use a computer to produce his portrait of the Dutch queen.
Struycken’s work, for which he often uses digital techniques, is based on a methodical, logical, consistent and verifiable investigation of colours, shapes and processes. In the late 1970s, for example, he used a simple computer program to design a series of sixteen pastel shades that he then used in his colour scheme for the auditorium of the Kröller-Müller Museum.
Struycken’s work is usually non-figurative or decorative. It takes on many different forms, ranging from sketches, paintings and videos to costumes, set designs, and lighting and visuals for dance or music concerts.
Struycken is best known among the general public for his interior and open-air spatial designs. He creates beautifully seductive works that give viewers a new sense of space, shape and colour, using the computer as one of the tools of his craft.
Struycken’s work takes people on a journey through a dynamic, three-dimensional colour space, for example his ten-metre-long screen in the Groningen Museum. However systematic and methodical the origins of the work may be, its viewers are caught up in a mystical experience.
Struycken created computer-controlled lighting for various buildings and interiors, for example for the underground passage of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, which is transformed into a rainbow arcade of coloured light at night. He also designed the ceiling of the Music Theatre in Amsterdam and the Concert Hall in Tilburg.
Another well-known work is Blue Waves, an undulating pattern of white and blue paving stones beneath a bridge crossing the Rhine in Arnhem.

Further reading
Struycken, P., ‘Colour mixtures according to Democritus ans Plato’, in: Mnemosyne, Vol. LVI, Fasc. 3, Leiden Brill 2003 ISSN 1568-525X (online version)
Struycken, P., ‘Enkele Oudgriekse denkbeelden over kleur’, in: Rein Ferwerda, P. Struycken, ‘Aristoteles’, Over kleuren, Budel: Damon 2002 ISBN 90 5573 129 3
Struycken, P., Trooping the colour / Kleur kleurt, Gorinchem: Gorkums Museum 2002 ISBN 90-804257

About the laureate
Peter Struycken was born in The Hague (Netherlands) in 1939. He entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague in 1957. In 1964, he became an instructor at the art academy in Arnhem. He was one of the founders there of the Monumental New Style Department, which encouraged students to interweave works of art into architecture and urban planning.
Struycken was made a Knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau in 1984.

Laudatio
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— Dutch

Article
— Interview with Peter Struycken in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

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Mark Manders was awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art 2010 for his consistent use of imagery in creating an intriguing world of his own, one that leaves ample scope for free association and plants itself deep in the memory.
Mark Manders is best known for his installations, for which he uses a variety of different materials, including wood, iron, plastic, rope, sand, paper and even teabags. He places familiar elements ‘a human figure, a chair, a table, a cat’ together in mysterious compositions and leaves their interpretation to the viewer. Manders also produces drawings, sculptures, films, and writes poems. His works represent the flow of his own ideas and meditations. Manders regards his oeuvre as a single, cohesive project, which he refers to as his ‘self-portrait as building’. It is not an autobiographical self-portrait, however, but a portrait of the artist as a fictional and (in his own words) ‘over-concentrated, neurotic, poetic person’, a ‘character who lives in a logically designed and constructed world which consists of thoughts that are halted or congeal at their moment of greatest intensity’. The Dutch arts magazine Kunstbeeld suggested that Manders’ best work ‘becomes art the way nature turns in freezing cold: immaculate and isolated at the same time, tranquil and full of tension’.

About the laureate
Mark Manders was born in Volkel, the Netherlands, in 1968. He attended the School of Graphic Design in Arnhem and the Arnhem Academy of Art and Design. His work has been exhibited extensively in the Netherlands and abroad, including solo exhibitions at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo (Netherlands), the Kunsthaus Zürich Museum for Modern Art, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Berkeley Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited at the Sao Paolo, Berlin and Venice Biennales and at Dokumenta in Kassel. His work has also been acquired by an impressive number of museums in Amsterdam, Eindhoven, Arnhem, Antwerp, Ghent, Munich, Dublin, Zurich, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis and Los Angeles. Manders is a recipient of the Prix de Rome (1992) and the Philip Morris Art Prize (2002).

Laudatio:
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— Dutch

Article:
— Interview with Mark Manders in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

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Barbara Visser was awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art 2008 for her photographic and video work, notable for its wide-ranging form and content and consistently distinct signature.
Barbara Visser’s photographs, videos and installations disrupt our patterns of expectations, sometimes very directly and sometimes more subtly. Alienation from reality and the astonishing nature of reality are certainly not unfamiliar themes in contemporary art, but Visser uses them in her work in a distinctively creative fashion and with immense visual conviction. For A Day in Holland/Holland in a Day (2001), for example, she disguised Dutch actors as Japanese tourists and photographed them in the Holland Village theme park in Nagasaki. The result: Dutchmen in Japan who look like Japanese in the Netherlands.
In an earlier work, she stuck a knife in the upholstery of a Martin Visser couch, similar to Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvasses. She battered other familiar icons of design furniture as well, robbing them of their functionality but transforming them into works of art at the same time (Detitled, 2000).
She attracted attention with The World Belongs to Early Risers (2002), a series of photographs of a man sunbathing on the seashore while, a short distance away, photographers are snapping photos of a refugee who has washed up on the beach.
Barbara Visser has also created future postcards. In one work, she had an actress impersonate her giving a lecture while she dictated the text into a microphone hidden in the actress’s ear. She used the recordings for her next work (Lecture on lecture with actress, 2004), in which she worked with another actress who resembled her more closely. Differing realities, originals and copies are recurring themes in Visser’s work.

About the laureate
Barbara Visser (Haarlem, 1966) attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and Cooper Union University in New York (1985 to 1991). In 1998 she spent a year at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht.
By now she has become a well-known name both in the Netherlands and abroad. Her work has been purchased by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum for Modern Art in Arnhem, the Municipal Museum of The Hague, the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem and the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. She has also taken part in exhibitions in Tokyo, Antwerp and Auckland, and exhibited at Büro Friedrich in Berlin and at the Sao Paulo Art Biennial. De Paviljoens Museum in Almere organised a retrospective exhibition of her work entitled Vertaalde Werken/Translated Works 1990-2006, accompanied by a publication (Barbara Visser is er niet).
Visser has received the Charlotte Köhler Award (1996), the Young Belgian Painting Prize (1999) and the David Roëll Award (2007).

Laudatio
— English
— Dutch

Article
— Interview with Barbara Visser in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

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Job Koelewijn was awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art 2006 for his richly variegated, poetic oeuvre.
Although conceptual in nature, Job Koelewijn’s work is also highly tactile. Koelewijn attracted attention early on, when he was still a student at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. For his final project, he had his mother and aunts dress in traditional Spakenburg folk costume and ritually clean the Academy’s glass exhibition pavilion. Since then his work has ranged from photography and film to architectural structures, and from small objects to large installations. He covered the floor of a Medieval hall in Middelburg with spaghetti, which was pulverised under the feet of visitors; he applied perfumed baby powder to the walls of a space at the Biennale in Venice; and he turned urban and rural landscapes into a ‘film screen’ by placing the auditorium of a cinema before them. Koelewijn makes abundant use of text in his work. He favours poetry, for example by Marsman or Beckett, and materials that appeal to the sense of touch, smell and hearing. His work is one of tremendous fragility and purity, qualities that, like cleanliness, he turns into themes; his ‘stories’ are always highly visual and imaginative and have an immediate appeal. Koelewijn’s work is not really commercial; much of it is produced for exhibitions and is temporary in nature.

About the laureate
Job Koelewijn (born in Spakenburg, the Netherlands, in 1962) lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam from 1987 to 1992 and spent a further year at the Sandberg Institute. In 1996 he spent a year in New York as an artist in residence at PS1, the contemporary art centre associated with MoMA. Koelewijn has shown his work at numerous exhibitions both in the Netherlands and abroad. In 1999 and 2001, for example, he submitted works to the Venice Biennale. His retrospective exhibition in 2005, held at Museum De Paviljoens in Almere, was entitled People can only deal with the fantasy when they are ready for it. His work has been purchased by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (Time Machine, an installation, was one of the last purchases made by the Stedelijk’s former artistic director, Rudi Fuchs) and many other major museums in the Netherlands and elsewhere.
Galerie Fons Welters in Amsterdam has presented solo exhibitions of Koelewijn’s work since 1995. For The World is My Oyster, Koelewijn hacked away virtually the entire back wall of the gallery to create a splendid frame for a neighbouring back garden. Fons Welters is currently presenting another exhibition of Koelewijn’s work (until 13 May, entitled Doorlopende Voorstelling (‘Continuous performance’), it shows four large-scale works, including a bookcase in the shape of a lemniscate.
Job Koelewijn has received the Charlotte Köhler Prize (1996), the Sandberg Prize (1999) by the Amsterdamse Kunstenfonds, and the Nebest Award (2002) for artists whose work makes striking use of the theme of building and construction.
Galerie Fons Welters published the monograph History, Future in 2003.

Laudatio
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— Dutch

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Daan van Golden was awarded the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art 2004 for his versatile output as an artist and his ability to place art in a new context, time and again.

Biography
Daan van Golden (born in Rotterdam in 1936) lived and worked in Schiedam, the Netherlands. After at-tending technical school, he enrolled at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Technical Sciences, where he specialised in painting and took classes in graphic techniques. He also worked as a window dresser for De Bijenkorf, an exclusive chain of department stores. He spent 1963 to 1965 in Japan and has travelled widely since then, with long sojourns in such places as Morocco, India, Indonesia, and North and South America. His travels have found their expression in his work.
There have been two major solo exhibitions of Daan van Golden’s work, one organised by the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in 1982 (Daan van Golden – 1963-1982) and the other by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1991 (Daan van Golden – Works 1962-1991). Van Golden was one of the artists featured in the Dutch pavilion at the 1999 Venice Biennial. Solo exhibitions have been organised in Geneva, Dijon, Paris and Göteborg. Van Golden’s work can also be viewed regularly at Galerie Micheline Szwajcer in Antwerp.
Daan van Golden died on 10 January 2017 in Schiedam.

Laudatio
— English

Article
— Interview with Daan van Golden in Akademie Nieuws (Dutch)

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Works of art

Clockwise: Composition with bleu, White painting, Heerenlux, Buddha