2023 edition
After careful consideration, the coordinators of the next edition of the Robert Schuman Art Prize, which will be hosted by the Stadtmuseum Simeonstift from 11 June to 20 August 2023, have chosen the four artists who will be representing their home cities and competing for this award. The winner of the Robert Schuman Art Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in southwestern of Germany, will be chosen by a jury of experts and receive a cash prize of €10,000.
Luxembourg
Exhibition coordinator Sandra Schwender has selected the following artists for Luxembourg City:
Tessy Bauer (born in 1981 in Luxembourg) lives and works in Brussels
Tessy Bauer is drawn to everyday items that hold sociological or symbolic meaning. Her approach is multidisciplinary; she uses several forms of expression including drawing, sculpture and movement. From these artistic ingredients emerges a polychromatic and plastic universe that acts as a reflection on human behaviour towards objects seen as commonplace.
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Lisa Kohl (born in 1988 in Luxembourg) lives and works in Luxembourg and Berlin
Lisa Kohl's work is a poetic representation of non-spaces and areas of transition, such as no-man's-lands and border zones, while focusing on human life and survival. Existential questions accompany her artistic research on a metaphorical level. She invites us to reflect on identity, transcending borders, hope and futility.
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Anni Mertens (born in 1995 in Luxembourg) lives and works in Rotterdam
Anni Mertens works mainly with ceramics, steel, found objects, and plenty of humour. Her work is intuitive, playing with materials, size and colour. Once her sculptures are assembled together, they form a theatre of the absurd. The works can be site specific and relate to their environment while the artist herself looks for unexpected placements and connections in the space.
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Roland Quetsch (born in 1979 in Luxembourg City) lives and works in Luxembourg City
Roland Quetsch's art is deeply rooted in painting and it allows him to tirelessly explore material and conceptual boundaries. His focus is on the evolution of painting, and he is interested as much in the work itself as in the colours, forms and medium.
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Metz
Artist and exhibition coordinator Vanessa Gandar, who on short notice replaced the initially selected coordinator Marco Godinho, has chosen the following artists for the city of Metz:
Gwendal Coulon (born in 1990 in Pontoise) lives and works in Metz and Thionville
Gwendal Coulon's creations are never truly designed to be cynical or deceptive; on the contrary they aim to reveal certain aspects of our nature. Using shifts, references and reinterpretations, he examines the conditions of the act of creation while integrating poetic elements. In this way he looks to reveal the flaws and the staging, both of the artist and their world. His performance practice draws on similar gestures: lip-synching, quotations, dramatisation and humour are the tools used to explore the event of the "concert" and its codes, aesthetic and context.
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Kim Détraux (born in 1994 in Montluçon) lives and works in Metz
The work of artist Kim Détraux explores the relationship we have with our environment through the installation of complete structures made up of objects that she makes. Once in place, they are designed to be used during participatory culinary performances where the artist creates a distinctive sharing experience. The act of eating activates all our senses and places us at the heart of the sensory experience. Distorting, borrowing and even deterritorialising the function of a material or object to make something else of it are all part of her process of experimentation.
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Tingting Wei, (born in 1987 in Xinjiang, China) lives and works in Metz and Paris
Tingting Wei is from Xinjiang, China. With humour and poetry, her practice combines simple and modest gestures to find a new form of everyday writing. Whether in video format, installations or drawings, she plays with repetition and monotony to seek out the essence of things and those little trifles that make up our natural and cultural environment.
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Valentin Pierrot (born in 1989 in Puy-en-Velay) lives and works in Metz and Strasbourg
The work of Valention Pierrot is rooted in time. The pieces that emerge bear testament to its passing, raising questions about our finite nature and simultaneously about the relationship we have with our environment. This work is intimately linked to nature and its survival, serving as a reflection on what will remain, a collection of the traces we leave.
More about Valentin Pierrot
Saarbrücken
Katja Pilisi, the exhibition coordinator for the city of Saarbrücken, has selected the following artists:
Cone the Weird (born in 1979 in Munich) lives and works in Saarbrücken
Cone the Weird began painting murals in 1993. He is part of the renowned artist collective The Weird, created in 2011. His sources of inspiration range from classical Renaissance paintings to contemporary pop culture. Cone The Weird's often complex and detailed compositions incorporate content at times autobiographical and at other times full of interwoven fictitious elements. They are poetic stories that give the observer, despite all the symbolic weight and layers of double meaning, generous leeway to apply their own interpretation.
More about Cone the Weird / www.conetheweird.de
Sarah Niecke (born in 1984 in Saarbrücken) lives and works in Saarbrücken
The work of Sarah Niecke, who in 2022 completed a degree in fine arts (Freie Kunst) at HBKsarr, reflects on digital and social relationships, transposes them into imagined chains of movement and expresses them through personal documentation. Technological and cinematographic detachment, and subjectivisation conditioned by performative confrontation are characteristic elements of her work. (Text: Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken)
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Darja Linder (born in 1992 in Telmansky, Russia) lives and works in Saarbrücken
In her figurative paintings, Darja Linder expresses her deep interest in the history of portraiture and painting, as well as in pop culture. She combines strokes reminiscent of the old masters such as Leonardo da Vinci with the saturated colours and flashy aesthetic of early 2000s album covers. With humour, she asks questions about topics such as class, gender and migration. She examines the connections between political structures and capitalistic and physical appetites, and through her paintings explores the depth of their roots in our identity. Whether in self portraits or portraits of others, she marries individual and collective experiences to create a sense of belonging to a community and of emancipation.
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Felix Noll, (born in 1995) lives and works in Saarbrücken and DeLand, Florida
The photography of Felix Noll principally deals with themes of identity and sexuality. His photography installation combining extracts of anatomical details of different scales to create unexpected and glorifying images of bodies won him second place for the Peter und Luise Hager Prize 2018. In 2021 he received a degree in communication design from the Saarbrücken Academy of Fine Arts.
More about Felix Noll
Trier
For the city of Trier, exhibition coordinator Bettina Ghasempoor has chosen the following artists:
Dorothee Herrmann (born in 1950 in Reil) lives and works in Reil
Dorothee Herrmann creates open spaces dedicated to objects. Both in the form of compact and powerful installations, and in subtle structures, she unveils inventive forms with detailed reimaginings. Polymorphous without straying far from her trademark style, she plays with the material nature of wood, clay, paper, textiles and photography. Thread redraws the space, and ceramics give birth to new landscapes.
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Leonie Mertes (born in 1967 in Neuerburg/Eifel du Sud) lives and works in Hüttingen
Leonie Mertes, a graduate of the Saarbrücken Academy of Fine Arts, works with simple materials like graphite, Indian ink and chalk to explore or to create spaces. The drawing surface, sensitive and ephemeral, becomes the site of activity for her intuitive and gestural work. With a process full of awareness, some of her works are purely temporary creations and add an additional dimension to the space: time.
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Elmar Hubert (born in 1963 in Trier) lives and works in Langsur
Elmar Hubert is concerned with the present and with current social issues, and he engages with them. The interaction between man and the environment is expressed and given form through his sculptures and installations. Bionics, meaning the transposition of natural phenomena in technology, plays an important role in his work. He creates steel sculptures up to 4 metres high which have already been displayed on several occasions in public spaces.
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David Ebner, (born in 1988 in Trier) lives and works in Berlin
David Ebner's installations are concerned with the properties of materials and their supposed contradictions: heaviness and lightness, hardness and softness, natural flow and technical overmoulding meet and are displayed in space through movement and sound. In 2018 he was nominated for the City of Trier's Ramboux Prize.
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