Colombian artist Doris Salcedo is the winner of the first annual Nomura Art Award. Recognising an artist whose work has consistently interrogated the social and political situation in her native country, the US$1 million prize is award to support a major project that the winner might not otherwise be able to realise.
Accepting the largest cash prize in contemporary visual arts, Salcedo said that ‘projects capable of honoring the experience of victims of violence requires a large investment in time and organisation, sometimes with many collaborators’. The award would, therefore, allow her ‘to move ahead much more quickly than I had expected with a project that is important to me, and that I hope will touch many people’.
The jury comprised Doryun Chong (Deputy Director, Curatorial and Chief Curator, M+), Kathy Halbreich (Executive Director, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation), Yuko Hasegawa, (Artistic Director, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo), Max Hollein (Director, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Nicholas Serota (Chair, Arts Council England), Allan Schwartzman (Founder and Principal of Art Agency, Partners, and Chairman, Fine Arts Division of Sotheby’s) and Okwui Enwezor (the curator contributed to its deliberations before his death last year).
Speaking on behalf of the jury, Nicholas Serota praised an artist whose works ‘preserve the memory of traumatic events in the long civil war in Colombia’ while also possessing ‘a universal meaning that speaks to people across the world’.
31 October 2019
