The Loth sculpture prize sponsored by L-Bank goes to Andreas Blank and the Art Affair gallery
Three prestigious art prizes awarded at art KARLSRUHE
This year's Loth Prize for Sculpture has been awarded to the Art Affair gallery in Regensburg and its artist Andreas Blank. The prize, worth €20,000 and supported by L-Bank, was awarded for the first time in 2018. It rewards both a sculptor and the gallery that presents him or her at one of the 21 KARLSRUHE art sculpture locations.
The jury justified its decision as follows: "Here is a sculptor at work who places us at the heart of his artistic conception of our real world and its social conditions. Where does the irony lead the viewer, the consumer of these tableaux of thought, into a thought-provoking learning process?"
Blank takes his inspiration from everyday objects: heavy leather boots, shirts neatly folded into large briefcases, and even detergent bottles. Unexpectedly, however, they are as cumbersome and impractical as they are heavy, because they are not made of leather, fabric or plastic, but of marble, alabaster and porphyry. In this way, Andreas Blank is perfectly in tune with the art of trompe l'oeil, which was mastered in the Baroque period, but which today's artists are happy to take up again. In the jury's motivation, we read: "Blank's objects are both 'precious stones' and stumbling blocks. Thanks to the artist's intellectual and practical intervention, the tension between nature/stone and culture/object has given rise to objects that he combines with sculptures to form a convincing installation".
Andreas Blank, born in 1976 in Ansbach, studied at the Karlsruher Kunstakademie and the HBK Hamburg, as well as at the Royal College of Art in London. He has been exhibiting internationally since 2012 and has received numerous awards. He was awarded a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes in 2005 and 2008, and was last honoured by the Kunstfonds Bonn foundation in 2022.
Hans Platschek Prize for Art and Writing awarded to Paula Doepfner
On the opening Thursday, the Hans Platschek Prize was awarded to Paula Doepfner. The laudator was Marion Ackermann, General Director of the National Art Collections in Dresden, who had nominated the artist on behalf of the Platschek Foundation. Rebecca Horn's pupil, who lives and works in Berlin, is "impressively up-to-date". Her writing is filigree and linear, yet extraordinarily serious, influenced by the literary work of writers such as Robert Musil and Paul Celan.
The 16th Karlsruhe Art Prize goes to Carlo Krone and Galerie Fuchs
The 16th Karlsruhe art prize, awarded for the first time at the opening ceremony, was awarded this year to the artist Carlo Krone and the Thomas Fuchs gallery. The €15,000 prize is awarded jointly by the Land of Baden-Württemberg and the city, and is used to purchase works from the artist's One Artist Show presented by the gallery. This year, 79 One Artist Shows will be presented at the fair. The work(s) purchased will join the art KARLSRUHE collection of the Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe.
Carlo Krone, represented by Thomas Fuchs Gallery in Stuttgart, has been studying with Professor Thomas Bechinger at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart since 2019. In his paintings, he takes everyday life as his theme, but twists it with a healthy dose of artistic freedom to give it the character of archetypes of our times.