Overview
The finalists' artworks will be exhibited at Auckland Art
Gallery Toi o Tāmaki for three months from 4 August, at the end of
which the winner will be announced.
The $50,000 Walters Prize is awarded for an outstanding work of
contemporary New Zealand art produced and exhibited during the past
two years. Previous winners were Yvonne Todd for Asthma and
Eczema (2002), et al. for restricted access (2004),
Francis Upritchard for Doomed, Doomed, All Doomed (2006),
Peter Robinson for ACK (2008) and Dan Arps for
Explaining Things (2010).
Named in honour of the late New Zealand artist Gordon Walters,
the Prize was established in 2002 by Founding Benefactors and
Principal Donors Erika and Robin Congreve and Dame Jenny Gibbs,
working together with Auckland Art Gallery. The Prize, held every
two years, aims to make contemporary art a more widely recognised
and debated feature of cultural life.
FINALISTS FOR THE WALTERS PRIZE 2012
Simon Denny: Introductory logic video
tutorial, shown at Artspace, Sydney (5 March-10 April
2010)
Alicia Frankovich: Floor Resistance,
shown at Hebbel Am Ufer, HAU 3, Berlin, (25 June 2011)
Kate Newby: Crawl out your window, shown
at Gesellschaft für aktuelle Kunst GAK,
Bremen (28 August-7 November 2010)
Sriwhana Spong: Fanta Silver and Song,
shown at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (4 February-5 March
2011)
The four finalists will each receive $5000, thanks to major
donor Dayle Mace.
Auckland Art Gallery Director Chris Saines says: 'The Walters
Prize is again set to
reinstate a group of four recent projects by contemporary New
Zealand artists that this year's jury - comprising David Cross,
Aaron Kriesler, Kate Montgomery and Gwyneth Porter - has selected
for inclusion in the Prize exhibition.
'The first to be presented in the Gallery's newly developed
building, in the Chartwell Gallery, the 2012 Walters Prize is again
generously supported by Founding Benefactors and Principal Donors
Erika and Robin Congreve and Dame Jenny Gibbs, who were
instrumental in the Prize's establishment in 2002.
'I want to extend my and their congratulations to Simon Denny,
Alicia Frankovich, Kate Newby and Sriwhana Spong, on becoming very
deserving finalists in the sixth Walters Prize. An international
judge has been invited to solely determine and then announce the
winner of the Prize at a dinner to be held on 20 October.
'For the first time ever this year's Prize features a group of
works all of which were first shown off-shore, although there have
been many works of this kind included over the years, as the Prize
rules allow.
'Twelve years on, as it moves into its new and permanent home,
the Walters Prize will doubtless continue to attract even stronger
public interest and to build and broaden the conversation around
New Zealand contemporary art.'
JURORS
David Cross - artist, writer, curator and
associate professor in Fine Arts at Massey
University, Wellington
Aaron Kriesler - curator at Dunedin Public Art
Gallery, Dunedin
Kate Montgomery - senior arts advisor for Visual
Art at Creative New Zealand
Gwynneth Porter - writer, editor and
publisher
INTERNATIONAL JUDGE
The international judge for the Walters Prize 2012 prize will be
named later this year. They will select the winner, announced at a
gala dinner in October. The winner will receive $50,000 and an all
expenses paid trip to New York, including the opportunity to
exhibit at Saatchi & Saatchi's world headquarters. The Walters
Prize 2010 international judge was highly respected former-director
of London's Tate Modern, Vicente Todoli.
JURORS' STATEMENT
In a two-year period marked by a multitude of compelling
exhibitions and projects the jury has settled on four bodies of
work which were each seen to occupy unique and adventurous
territory in New Zealand art. Nominations were arrived at on the
basis of showing strong evidence of a particular kind of searching
engagement within the artists' own practice and with the conditions
of the larger world beyond.
While a variety of methodological approaches are visible in the
selection, this was not the intention of the jury at the outset.
Rather, it was a by-product of the vitality and imaginativeness of
the field in general. What does inform all of the selections is an
engagement with how the discrete sculptural object is pushed beyond
itself into film, installation, work in public space and
performance.
The jury is firmly of the belief that each artist has in
startling ways interrogated and pushed their practice with great
rigour and dexterity to offer new meditations on the possibilities
of material, form and its assorted social contexts. Ultimately,
each project demonstrated a palpable influence on the art making
and viewing communities from which it has arisen.
SIMON DENNY
Born 1982 in Auckland, New Zealand
Lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand and Berlin, Germany
Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt
am Main 2009
Jurors' comment:
While the jury were impressed with a number of Simon Denny's
recent bodies of work, his major project for Artspace, Sydney,
Introductory logic video tutorial, was identified as being
especially significant. The exhibition set up a platform for Denny
to retrace, expand and actualise his academic experiences as a
philosophy student at Sydney University. For the Artspace
installation, the artist created a network of interconnecting
tautological statements, screen grabs, television monitors (both
real and surrogates), and an inventory of the gallery's audiovisual
gear which together charted a clever path through a fictional
educational video.
ALICIA FRANKOVICH
Born 1980 in Tauranga, New Zealand
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
Bachelor of Visual Arts, Auckland University of Technology
2002
Jurors' comment:
Alicia Frankovich has developed a number of exceptional bodies of
work over the prize period both in New Zealand and overseas. The
panel was especially compelled by her performance work Floor
Resistance which took place at the Hebbel Am Ufer in Berlin in
2011. This work re-negotiates the audience/performer relationship
employing an orchestra in an unconventional configuration to unfold
highly original ideas pertaining to the staging of live art. By
altering the positioning and placement of the orchestra in the
space, Frankovich asks us to rethink and experience anew the
relationship between audience member and participant.
KATE NEWBY
Born 1979 in Auckland, New Zealand
Lives and works in New York, USA and Auckland, New Zealand
Master of Fine Arts, Elam School of Fine Arts, University of
Auckland 2007
Jurors' comment:
Kate Newby's works alert our attention to specific textures and
experiences that subtly set themselves apart from the everyday.
Crawl out your window presented a series of works
developed for the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst (GAK) in Bremen,
Germany. Newby's projects there, like a number of others since,
were composed of simple materials and gestures rich in association
which quietly forged links between her host institution, their
gallery spaces and the world outside. Entering into conversation
with their surroundings in a sensitive and measured way, Newby's
works drew from and amplified the contexts within which they found
themselves.
SRIWHANA SPONG
Born 1979 in Auckland, New Zealand
Lives and works in Auckland
Bachelor of Fine Arts, Elam School of Fine Arts, University of
Auckland 2001
Jurors' comment:
Sriwhana Spong's Fanta Silver and Song drew together work based in
the artist's
fathoming of interpretation, gesture, orientalism and sculptural
and etheric presence. The two films - Costume for a Mourner and
Lethe-wards - re-imagined a Diaghilev ballet originally performed
by the Ballets Russes of which nothing more than static fragments
survived. The show also involved collages made from pages of 1960s
ballet picture books, silk gauze costumes dyed in soft-drink, and a
geometric sculpture which seem to suggest diagrams of movement as
an emergent individual or a group event.
Founding Benefactors and Principal Donors
Erika and Robin Congreve
Dame Jenny Gibbs
Major Donor
Dayle Mace
Portraits of the artists, their projects and CVs are
available.
For more information please contact:
Tae Allison
Communications Coordinator
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki
P +64 9 307 7706
M +64 27 291 9953
E tae.allison@aucklandcouncil.govt.nz