Yesterday, Wednesday January 12, at 7 p.m., Claude Bonnin unveiled on Instagram the names of the four artists competing for the 2022 Marcel Duchamp Prize.
Awarded by the Association for the International Diffusion of French Art (Adiaf), the Marcel Duchamp Prize was created in 2000 to reward the most influential French talents. After a long selection process by a jury of 11 collectors, the names of the artists named this year are finally known. This year’s finalists are Giulia Andreani, Ivan Argote, Mimosa Echard and Philippe Decrauzat. For this 22nd edition, artists are invited from October 4 in gallery 4 of the Centre Pompidou for a group exhibition and the name of the winner will be announced by the international jury on October 17th.
The 2022 selection
The 4 artists shortlisted for the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2022 express themselves through several media and several disciplines: history painting, sculpture, performance, bewitched painting, hybrid creation or optical forms.
On the one hand, Giulia Andreani develops a genre long fallen into disuse, but prized in the European pictorial tradition, the history painting. This history painting is apprehended here with a contemporary vision. The artist constantly works with archival images that she sorts and selects. By recomposing reality, it offers a realistic rendering but tinged on the one hand with magic, where ghostly figures and dreamlike interact with the banality of reality. This reality can contain a social and feminist dimension when it represents women during the First World War or in uniform. She is also working on a project dedicated to the first women who had access to the Grand Prix de Rome.
Ivan Argote mixes videos, sculptures and performances through a political and sociological approach. He seeks to question our relationship to power, to institutions and to others. Among his video creations and performances, we can remember the series Untitled (Paris) (2010), Untitled (New York) (2011) and Untitled (Madrid) (2012). In this performance filmed in slow motion, he was able to explore the emotions of passers-by after having shouted “I Love you” or “You are beautiful” at them, while seeking the emotional charge of silence and the smile that follows.
The third finalist is Mimosa Echard. Born in 1985, she offers a multi-media work where the border between the real world (organic objects) and the market world (consumer objects) is blurred. After being revealed at the Salon de Montrouge in 2012 and nominated for the Prix Meurice in 2015, she presented her first solo exhibition at the Samy Abraham gallery, iDEATH, in 2016. Her approach revolves around a mutant, fossil, universe. in a chaos where natural materials and synthetic materials.
Portrait of Mimosa Echard © ️Camille Vivier
Finally, the last nominee is Philippe Decrauzat. Swiss artist but living in France, born in 1974, he was closely interested in cinema, architecture, music, literature and graphics. It is on this last point that his works take on meaning in optical research and atmospheres hypnotics. Waves, visual rhythms, graphic painting and streaks characterize his production which tends towards a distortion – often monochrome – of the surface and the real.
The winner will benefit from a creation aid in the amount of 35,000 euros and visibility, in particular through the collective exhibition organized at the Center Pompidou in Paris.