The Museum Haus Konstruktiv and Zurich Insurance Group Ltd have announced Sicily-born, Berlin-based installation artist Rosa Barba as the 19th winner of Zurich Art Prize.
Barba will now receive 100,000 CHF ($124,000) toward a show at the Museum Haus Konstructiv, which is located in Zurich, as well as another 30,000 CHF ($37,000) for winning the prize. The news was first reported by Monopol.
The annual honor recognizes an artistic practice that marries “the cultural heritage of constructivist-concrete and conceptual art [with] contemporary trends,” according to a release. Barba’s conceptual installations regularly engage film, sculpture, and sound to collapse the divisions between time and space, often in the pursuit of insights into the human impact on the natural world.
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This summer, she presented the cinematic installation “The Ocean of One’s Pause” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition brought together 12 works made over a 15-year period, exploring light as an agent of ecological change. The kinetic work—a non-film film, per press materials—was accompanied by a series of performances described by the artist as an “exploded poem.”
“My work always involves a search for the sublime in some way, and explores perception and how we look at things, even if they are dangerous or catastrophic,” Barba told Art in America in June. “But there is always this sense of fragility: catastrophe and beauty are often very much linked, and I’m interested in walking this line.”