et al. WINS THE WALTERS PRIZE

On Friday 29 October the Auckland artists et al. won the Walters Prize, New Zealand's most prestigious and richest art award. The award was announced at a gala dinner at Auckland Art Gallery. The Walters Prize is awarded to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to New Zealand art in the past two years. More

Prize awarded 29 October 2004

The Walters Prize was established to promote interest in New Zealand contemporary art, making it more accessible to a potentially larger and more culturally diverse public. Modelled on overseas awards such as the Tate's Turner Prize, it is awarded to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution over the past two years to contemporary visual art in New Zealand. A jury of New Zealand curators and critics select four finalists who present work in an exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. On the basis of this presentation, an international judge selects the winning artist.

Launched in 2002, by Prime Minister Helen Clark the Walters Prize was the initiative of founding benefactors and principal donors Erika and Robin Congreve and Jenny Gibbs, working in partnership with the Auckland Art Gallery. The Walters Prize is New Zealand's largest art prize, with the winner receiving $50,000. This year, thanks to major donor Dayle Mace, the finalists will also each receive a Finalist Award.

And this year's finalists are...

et al., for restricted access (2003)

First exhibited Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 2003

Jacqueline Fraser, for <<Invisible>> (2004)

First exhibited National Museum and Gallery, Cardiff, 2004

Ronnie van Hout, for No Exit Parts 1 and 2 (2003)

First exhibited Linden Gallery, Melbourne, and Physics Room, Christchurch, respectively, 2003

Daniel von Sturmer, for The Truth Effect (2003)

First exhibited Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2003

The Walters Prize 2004 will be judged by international curator and critic Robert Storr

So what did the jury have to say?

Selecting our four artists who have made an outstanding contribution to New Zealand art in the last two years proved challenging and exhilarating. We have chosen artists whose work we consider timely and important, who offer something distinctive. Each has affected us - as regular viewers of current practice - in memorable ways.

Ronnie van Hout is one of a number of contemporary artists who explore the image of the artist as a wayward figure in contemporary life. But he brings to this subject an array of idiosyncratic obsessions that situate his practice in the realms of the personal and the local. His recent series No Exit is characteristic. It presents the artist in a multitude of guises - creepy nature worshipper, alien abductor, abject idler, frustrated artist - in situations as solipsistic as the series' title. His works do something rare in the world of contemporary art -make you laugh but leave you strangely moved.

et al. are a conundrum: a shifting group of artistic entities designed to jam the systems and institutions of art. Their installations over the last two years - seen in such shows as abnormal mass delusions? and Public/Private: The 2nd Auckland Triennial - have consistently produced an eerie critique of our human condition, exposing our tendency to trust inevitably flawed intellectual models and technological solutions. In such light, restricted access from abnormal mass delusions?, with its massing of adjusted and recycled objects behind a mesh barricade, is a sombre experiment in resisting the relentless drift to obsolescence.

Jacqueline Fraser has enjoyed outstanding international success in the last two years. She brings an astute and elegantly barbed sensibility to her consideration of contemporary issues. In <<Invisible>>, a major installation conceived for Artes Mundi (an award exhibition at Cardiff's National Museum and Gallery featuring ten artists selected by leading inter-national curators), she uses glamorous textiles to clothe a line-up of wraith-like female figures, combining these with pithy epithets that sting us about our fascination for fashion in a world of inequality and grief.

Daniel von Sturmer may be less well known to New Zealand audiences, having made most of his work in Australia. His video installation The Truth Effect, seen last year at Melbourne's ACCA and Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof, is a breath of fresh air. It orchestrates simple materials in lightly wrought situations within the confines of a simple white box. Represented via video, the box becomes something more: a spacious light-filled room, the white cube of the modern art gallery, a television studio or laboratory. What we see defies the simplicity of both origins and means, conveying to the viewer a new sense of the marvellous.

The 2004 jury comprised: Christina Barton, writer, curator and lecturer in Art History at Victoria University of Wellington; Dr Deidre Brown, freelance curator and Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries, University of Auckland; Greg Burke, director of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery; and Justin Paton, curator at Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Editor of the journal Landfall.

The 2004 Walters Prize is to be judged by leading international art curator Robert Storr. He is best known for his time as Senior Curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art (1990-2002), where he was responsible for such shows as the critically acclaimed 2002 Gerhard Richter retrospective. In 2000 he was on the selection panel for the Biennale of Sydney, which included New Zealand artists Bill Hammond, Lisa Reihana and the Pacific Sisters. In 2001 he was on the Turner Prize jury that selected Martin Creed's Work #227: The Lights Going On and Off. He has written on many key 20th century artists including Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning, Raymond Pettibon and Charles Ray. Storr is a contributing editor at Art in America, and frequently writes for Artforum and the New York Times. In 2002 Storr was appointed Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. This year he curates the SITE Santa Fe International Biennial, exploring the grotesque in contemporary art. This will be Robert Storr's first visit to New Zealand.

Public programme highlights include talks by nominated artists, responses by local art critics and commentators, an 'After Hours' party, and a lecture by the Prize Judge, Robert Storr.

The Walters Prize 2004 will be accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue.

Admission charge.

Founding Benefactors and Principal Donors
Erika and Robin Congreve
Jenny Gibbs

Major Donor
Dayle Mace

Principal Sponsor

Founding Sponsor 

Major Sponsor