The Nigerian, Antwerp-based artist Otobong Nkanga was announced today as the 2025 Nasher Prize Laureate, a prestigious $100,000 award given by the Nasher Sculpture Center to recognize a living artist who has made profound achievements in sculpture. Nasher director Jeremy Strick also announced that the prize will be awarded biannually moving forward, allowing for the artist and museum to prepare a monograph and full-scale exhibition at the Dallas institution. Nkanga’s exhibition is slated to open at the Nasher in April 2025.
“[Nkanga’s] work harnesses sculpture’s capacity to embody experience; uses the Earth’s raw materials to incite feelings such as belonging, nostalgia, retrospection—through objects, through performance, through textiles, drawing, painting, poetry,” Strick said during a press event on Wednesday. “She affects her audience, while suddenly addressing issues of consumption, globalism, connectivity, and more.”
Nkanga is best known for dazzling multidisciplinary installations—incorporating everything from shimmering, dystopian quilts and murano glass to earth, lava rocks, pools of water, and tree trunks—that raise urgent issues about our relationship to the environment. Her work has resonated internationally over the past decade and a half, evidenced by her impressive exhibition history, including at the major biennials (Venice and São Paulo, as well as Sharjah three times, among others) and solo exhibitions at esteemed art museums worldwide (Hayward Gallery, Tate, Zeitz MOCAA, and Castello di Rivoli, to name a few).
Nkanga was chosen by a jury of esteemed artists, curators, and other art professionals including Nairy Baghramian, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Lynne Cooke, Briony Fer, Hou Hanru, Yuko Hasegawa, Rashid Johnson, Pablo León de la Barra, and Sir Nicholas Serota. “The prize is awarded to an artist for body of work, for a trajectory, for some sense of promise, for an ability to move the language of sculpture forward, as I think Otobong does, in a very exciting way,” Serota said in a video in honor of Nkanga.
Strick described the honor as “the only prize of its kind and scale devoted exclusively to excellence in the field of sculpture.” The previous Nasher Prize Laureates are Senga Nengudi, Nairy Baghramian, Michael Rakowitz, Isa Genzken, Theaster Gates, Pierre Huyghe, and Doris Salcedo.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/FrhCX0H
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