The Artaward endowed with € 10,000 and the four recognitions worth € 3,000 each were awarded on May 29, 2008 in the Art Lounge in the STRABAG HAUS.
Welcome and award ceremony: Dr. Hans Peter Haselsteiner. About the artists: Prof. Dr. Wieland Schmied, art historian Duration of the exhibition: 30.05.-26.06.2008
The Strabag Art Forum is pleased to announce the winner of the STRABAG ARTAWARD 2008:
In 2008, 375 artists submitted their application documents. For the first time, it was possible to apply both by post and on the Internet on the Strabag Kunstforum homepage. The personal care of the participants is a major concern of the Kunstforum team, which follows the development of most of the artists. Participants who have not won a prize this year, but whose works have already stood out for their high quality, are invited to continue participating. After several months of intensive work, after the pre-selection by the Strabag Art Forum, five artists from among 43 final participants were nominated by the final jury. In 2008, the expert jury, which changes every three years, consisted of: Prof. Dr. Wieland Schmied, art historian; Florian Steininger, Curator Bank Austria Kunstforum, Vienna; Mag. Edith Raidl, contemporary art expert; Wilhelm Weiss and Barbara Baum, director and artistic director of the Strabag Art Forum.
JULIA MAURER
Julia Maurer has primarily dedicated herself to the small format. Mostly operating in pale and earthy colors, the young artist paints delicate, fragile pictures with personal content. These paintings are evidence of silence and poetry: a romantic atmosphere spreads: a skier from behind, a tree in the vastness of the landscape.
FELIX MALNIG
Felix Malnig has embarked on a new technical path. In his previous work, the artist had used bubble wrap instead of the canvas. The photographs generated images formed a grid system on the circular air chambers, whereby the freely painterly was relativized in favor of the technically reproducible. Now a silvery surface covers the picture carrier, which alternates between mattness and reflection. Malnig paints the architectural subjects in a schematic way on the ground. In the distance, colors and shapes flow into a homogeneous picture structure.
BERNHARD BUHMANN
Scenes from everyday life in which the human figure is placed in the center with portrait-like features. A melancholy mood emanates from the protagonists in the picture, an introverted appearance that turns private things outside. Buhmann addresses his environment - youth culture. In his art, painting per se has an elementary value, in connection with an increased realization of reality: highlights, plasticity, materiality. Mag. Florian Steininger, Curator Bank Austria Kunstforum
NIEVES SALZMANN
Nieves Salzmann occupies a very picturesque position among the winners. She is primarily committed to the landscape. With open brushstrokes and impasto application of paint, she composes strictly ordered landscape systems. The organic natural structures become dynamically aligned strip segments that are filled with pure painting. Their color spectrum can be found in the dark broken brown and green.
AWARD WINNER MARKUS PROSCHEK
As in the previous year, the canon of figuration dominates the painting and drawing media of young contemporary artists. A wide range of formal and thematic options can be identified. It ranges from factual, photographically oriented articulations to examples in which the work equipment itself comes to the fore.
Markus Proschek, this year's main prize winner, impresses with monumental paintings that are characterized by a precise description. However, this mimetic moment does not show itself in a direct translation of reality, but in a tense arrangement of the picture motifs. Quotes from art history are inscribed in rooms that are reminiscent of fascist architecture, or vice versa: sculptures with the schematized features of the ideologized body are placed in current environments.
