1st Prize Winner
Rolf Hanson was born in Malmö, Sweden in 1953. He now lives in Stockholm. During the period 1974 -1979 Hanson studied at the College of Fine Arts in Stockholm and was awarded a P.S.1 studio grant in New York 1982-1983. In 1985 the Moderna Museet devoted a solo exhibition to Hanson's works, and he soon became recognized as one of the leading artists of his generation. His painting is rooted in the Nordic landscape tradition, and in his pictures, saturated with colour, the viewer encounters an organic landscape bursting with colour from which figurative elements such as houses and buildings have lately begun to emerge from what was previously untamed nature.
2nd Prize Winner
Silja Rantanen was born in 1956 in Helsinki, Finland, where she still resides. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki during the period 1976-1980. The common denominator of Rantanen’s works is space and spatiality. She finds her expression in the encounter between the two- and the three-dimensional. In her paintings, the three dimensions of space are translated into the paintings’ two dimensions. She processes the spatial and color experiences of the different places she has visited in her mental memory charts.
3rd Prize Winner
Clay Ketter was born in Brunswick, Maine, USA in 1961. He now lives in Lilla Uppåkra, Sweden. During the period 1980-1985 Ketter studied at the State University of New York at Purchase Center for the Arts. Taking advantage of his past as both carpenter and artist in the U.S. as well as in Sweden, Ketter pragmatically combines these two aspects in his art. His wall paintings – which really give new meaning to the word – combine painting with both sculpture and architecture without ever losing their primary emphasis on painting.
Scholarship
Tal R was born in Tel Aviv in 1967. He now lives in Copenhagen where he has attended the Academy of Fine Arts since 1994. Tal R covers the surface of his expressive paintings with motifs taken from everyday life, and his immediate surroundings provide both the source of inspiration and the context for his work. There, reminiscent of Cobra as well as Matisse, fragments of his daily life: friends, music and anything else that is part of that life are woven into a whole. His installations often combine paintings with shapshots, drawings, texts and textiles which fill the room, and in which the constituent parts communicate both with each other and with the viewer.