Pierre Huyghe awarded the 2017 Nasher Prize for sculpture

The French artist Pierre Huyghe has been announced as the recipient of the 2017 Nasher Prize, presented by the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, USA.

Now in its second year, the annual award was established to honour a living artist who ‘elevates the understanding of sculpture and its possibilities’. The 2016 prize was awarded to the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo.

Huyghe’s artworks have combined sculpture with music, cinema, dance, and theatre, working with both naturally occurring and time-based elements as well as more traditional sculptural materials.

Talking about his work, he said: “I’m looking at the co-evolution of interdependent agents, biotic and abiotic, real or symbolic — different states of living, self-organizing in a dynamic and unstable situation: mesh, porous, contingent.

“It could be immaterial things such as time, light, temperature, air, scents, but interconnected within a network of material systems in order to generate a particular and sensible experience.”

Huyghe was chosen by an international jury that included the artists Phyllida Barlow and Huma Bhabha.

The other jurors were: Lynne Cooke, senior curator, National Gallery of Art; Okwui Enwezor, director, Haus der Kunst; Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT); Steven A. Nash, founding director of the Nasher Sculpture Center; Alexander Potts, art historian; Sir Nicholas Serota, director, Tate; and Pablo León de la Barra, UBS MAP curator, Guggenheim.

Said Enwezor: “Huyghe’s work extends far beyond any tidy definition of sculpture in ways that continue to grow and develop well into his career, allowing for ever new discoveries and artistic possibilities. In that, we found him exceedingly deserving of this significant award.”

Huyghe will be presented with an award designed by Renzo Piano, architect of the Nasher Sculpture Center, at a ceremony in Dallas on April 1, 2017.

Image:
Pierre Huyghe, Cambrian Explosion, 2014. Live marine ecosystem. Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography Zürich

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