1st Prize Winner Kristján Guðmundsson
The Jury's Statement
Kristján Guðmundsson is awarded the Carnegie Prize of SEK 1,000,000 for his intriguing sound-absorbing paintings, made of acrylic on canvas mounted in metal panels, pursuing his unique explorations of the aesthetic dimension of painting and drawing with characteristic wit and visual sensibility. In the course of Guðmundsson’s career that spans forty years, his art has consistently defied conventional logic by combining such disparate elements as colour and sound, breaking new ground in the examination of the medium of painting.
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Kristján Guðmundsson was born in 1941 in Snæfellsnes, Iceland, and lives in Reykjavik. He is an autodidact. Kristján Guðmundsson has been impressively consistent in his explorations over more than four decades of the terms and foundations of drawing and painting, and how time and dimensions, cause and effect, can be visualised. His Black and White Paintings in Grey and White Frames consist of black and white monochrome paintings that have been placed in custom-made grey and white metal frames. A sound-insulating material has again been placed behind the painted canvases, with the effect that the works attain a synaesthetic quality, absorbing the surrounding noise. In these sound-absorbing paintings, he has characteristically, and with a shrewd wink at minimalism, once again merged material and idea into aesthetic objects replete with meaning.
Kristján Guðmundsson has exhibited at galleries and museums all over the world since the late 1960s. He was one of the founders of the avant-garde gallery SÚM in Reykjavik in 1968. In the 1970s, he lived in Amsterdam, where conceptual art, the dominating tendency at the time, impacted lastingly on him. In 1982, he participated in the Venice Biennale. Spring 2009 saw the opening of his major solo exhibition at Listasafn Islands, National Gallery of Iceland, in Reykjavik. Guðmundsson is represented in several museum collections, including Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; National Gallery of Iceland, Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Reykjavik Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Kristján Guðmundsson also featured in the Carnegie Art Award 2001 exhibition.
2nd Prize Winner Kristina Jansson
The Jury's Statement
Kristina Jansson is awarded the Carnegie Prize of SEK 600,000 for her paintings that evoke a veritable echo of a place, strange, speechless, yet convincing and insistent. Breathtakingly exquisite, her paintings are profoundly sensual, yet with an eerie, uncanny, unheimlich quality. Her canvases are charged with an existential mood that appears, just then, just there, to be only attainable through painting!
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Kristina Jansson was born in 1967 in Väse, Sweden, and lives in Stockholm. In 1995–2001, she studied at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm, and in 1998 at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris. Prior to that, in 1994–1995, she was at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
The medium of paint is primary to Kristina Jansson’s work, and the painterly process combined with the conceptual message leads to variations in the style of each respective work according to the problems they deal with. The spectator is spellbound by the dense, evocative and magical atmosphere conveyed by her images. Taking a strange tale about a remarkable piece of architecture as her starting point, Jansson has produced the two seductive psychologically charged paintings presented in this exhibition.
Since the mid-1990s, Kristina Jansson has participated in numerous exhibitions in Europe and the USA. She is represented in the Moderna Museet collection in Stockholm and in several private collections, including the Hort Family Collection, New York, JK Brown and Eric Diefenbach, New York; Bo Ahlstrand, Stockholm; Storåkers Collection and the Strauss Family Collection, New York. Kristina Jansson was also featured in the Carnegie Art Award in 2008.
3rd Prize Winner Felix Gmelin
The Jury'S Statement
Felix Gmelin is awarded the Carnegie Prize of SEK 400,000 for a work that is an almost archaeological exploration of the social and political ramifications of the tactility and expressiveness of painting. A key topic in early performance art, Gmelin returns to this field of action in a complex work that reconsiders the painterly “touch” by passing through the media of film, painting and printed stills.
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Felix Gmelin was born in 1962 in Heidelberg, Germany and now lives in Berlin and Stockholm. He studied at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1983–1988.
As in several of Felix Gmelin’s previous works, which feature both historical and political references, archive material is a vital source. His works are often presented as complex installations, both with regard to style and concept. The work shown in this exhibition, Ambiguous Gestures, contains references to his father’s work; in it, he recycles a film made by his father in the mid-1980s, which, in turn refers to 1960s Vienna actionism. This socio-political commentary is reused by Gmelin and accompanied by a few highly tactile paintings on thin polyester and stills from the equally tactile film.
Felix Gmelin has been featured in many exhibitions internationally and has participated in the Venice Biennale twice, in 2003 and 2007. He is represented in several institutions and private collections, including Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Göteborgs Konstmuseum; Malmö Konstmuseum; the Saatchi & Saatchi Collection, London; the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, New York; the Hort Family Collection, New York, and JK Brown and Eric Diefenbach, New York.
Scholarship Marie Søndergaard Lolk
The Jury's Statement
The Carnegie scholarship of SEK 100,000 is awarded to Marie Søndergaard Lolk for her original contribution to the development of an artistic form that is both process-oriented and saturated in information. Her works explore the history of painting in subtle ways, while also displaying an impressive conceptual clarity and a materially impenetrable quality.
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Marie Søndergaard Lolk was born in 1981 in Randers, Denmark and lives in Copenhagen. She studied at the Academy of Art in Copenhagen in 2002–2008.
In a veritably archaeological process, Marie Søndergaard Lolk examines the materiality of painting in dense paintings with an almost sculptural quality. Over time and space, she builds her own conceptual works with countless layers of paint, occasionally with the addition of other materials. The works are often based on written sources, such as correspondence or texts, which appear in the paintings in the form of letters, meticulously cut out in the colour layers of the painting to form sunken characters, or in high relief. The result is weighty paintings in which the account of their creation often constitutes an essential part of the final work.
Marie Søndergaard Lolk has had several exhibitions in Denmark since the early 2000s. She is represented in the collection of Malmö Konstmuseum.