Jury Announced for 2015 Absolut Art Award

Absolut is pleased to announce the Jury for the 2015 Absolut Art Award, led by newly-appointed Jury President Massimiliano Gioni, Associate Director and Director of Exhibitions at the New Museum in New York and Artistic Director at the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Milan. 

 The international Jury for the 2015 Absolut Art Award will include three additional distinguished curators: Magali Arriola, Curator at Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Doryun Chong, Chief Curator at M+, Hong Kong; and Jessica Morgan, The Daskalopoulos Curator, International Art at Tate Modern and Artistic Director of the 10th Gwangju Biennale, as well as Negar Azimi, writer and Senior Editor of Bidoun magazine. 

The Absolut Art Award offers an artist and an art writer a unique opportunity to realise a dream project, demonstrating our continued commitment to collaborating on transformative projects with the world’s most interesting creative talent. The winning artist will receive a cash prize of €20,000, complemented by a budget of €100,000 to produce and exhibit a new art work. The winning art writer will also be awarded a cash prize of €20,000, along with a budget of €25,000 to be used towards the research and production of a new art publication. 

Each member of the 2015 Jury will invite two nominators, who range across multiple artistic disciplines and professional art backgrounds, to nominate five artists and one art writer unrestricted by age or geography, generating a maximum of fifty nominees for the ‘Art Work’ category and a maximum of ten nominees for the ‘Art Writing’ category. The Jury will select one winner in each category from a final shortlist of five artists and five art writers. 

The winning artist and writer will be announced during the Vernissage of La Biennale di Venezia - 56th International Art Exhibition in May 2015, followed by an awards ceremony in September 2015 in Stockholm, Sweden. 

In 2013 the Absolut Art Award was awarded to Renata Lucas for ‘Art Work’ and Coco Fusco for ‘Art Writing’. Previous Absolut Art Award winners have also included Anri Sala (2011), Rirkrit Tiravanija (2010) and Keren Cytter (2009). 

“The Absolut Art Award is an incredible opportunity to recognise the work of leading contemporary artists and art writers, and together with the distinguished panel of judges, I am honoured to be part of the process”, says Massimiliano Gioni, 2015 Absolut Art Award Jury President. 

“We are delighted to begin our search for the winners of the 2015 Absolut Art Award. The award offers the chance to transform the trajectory of an artist and art writer’s career and an opportunity to realise their dream projects”, says Saskia Neuman, Global Art Manager, Absolut. 

THE 2015 ABSOLUT ART AWARD JURY 

2015 Jury President: 

Massimiliano Gioni is the Associate Director and Director of Exhibitions at the New Museum in New York and the Artistic Director at the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Milan. In 2013, he served as the Artistic Director of the 55th edition of La Biennale di Venezia, The Encyclopedic Palace. 

2015 Jury Members: 

Magali Arriola is an art critic and Curator at Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City. Previously, she was Chief Curator at the Museo Tamayo (2009‒11) and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (1998-2001). 

Negar Azimi is a writer and Senior Editor of Bidoun, an award-winning publishing, curatorial and educational platform. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Frieze, Harper’s Bazaar, The Nation, NewYorker.com and The New York Times Magazine. 

Doryun Chong is Chief Curator at M+, a museum for visual culture located in the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong due to be completed in 2017. From 2009 to 2012, Chong was Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, New York. 

Jessica Morgan is The Daskalopoulos Curator, International Art, Tate Modern, and the Artistic Director of the forthcoming 10th Gwangju Biennale Burning Down the House (5 September – 9 November 2014). 

Notes to the editor: 

 Absolut and Art 

The first spirit brand to forge genuinely close ties with art and artists, Absolut has been active in the art world since 1985, when it invited Andy Warhol to create the first in a series of iconic advertisements inspired by the Absolut bottle. Since then, Absolut has collaborated with more than 550 artists on over 850 commissioned projects. Today, Absolut supports acclaimed artists, art writers and institutions in their efforts to present new works, stimulate ideas, bring people together and broaden access to creativity. 

Since 2012, Absolut has continued to support contemporary art through multiple partnerships with major institutions, including dOCUMENTA (13); a multi-year partnership with Art Basel and support of its Conversations series; and a year-round partnership with Palais de Tokyo; as well as the biannual Absolut Art Award. Absolut continues to offer artists and writers a global platform and opportunity to realise dream projects through artist collaborations, most recently through a number of ambitious site-specific Art Bar installations. Previous collaborations include Jeremy Shaw on Kirlian (2012) and Mickalene Thomas on Better Days (2013) at Art Basel; Los Carpinteros on Güiro (2012) and Ry Rocklen (2013) on Night Court at Art Basel in Miami Beach; Adrian Wong on Wun Dun (2013) and Nadim Abbas’s Apocalypse Postponed (2014) at Art Basel in Hong Kong; as well as Olafur Eliasson on Little Sun (2014) at Coachella and artist collective Caravan on A Grain of Sand (2014) at Art Dubai. 

 The Absolut Art Award 

The Absolut Art Award was instituted in 2009 to mark 30 years of creative collaborations with artists. The award offers an artist and an art writer a unique opportunity to realise their dream projects, demonstrating Absolut’s continue commitment to collaborating on transformative projects with the world’s most creative talent. In 2012, Absolut announced a new format for the Absolut Art Award providing recognition and project funding for both artists and art writers. The new structure for the Award allows each of the five Jurors and ten Nominators to recommend five artists and one art writer, respectively, generating a maximum of fifty nominees for the ‘Art Work’ category and a maximum of ten nominees for the ‘Art Writing’ category. 

For further information on the 2015 Absolut Art Award, please contact: Sutton PR: Allison Thorpe or Abigail Varian Allison@suttonpr.com / abigail@suttonpr.com. 

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From Left to Right: Magali Arriola, Negar Azimi, Massimiliano Gioni, Doryun Chong, Jessica Morgan.*

*Full image credits: Massimiliano Gioni. Photo: Marco De Scalzi. Courtesy Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan Jessica Morgan. Photo: Olivia Hemingway. Courtesy Tate Photography.