Dallas, Texas
April 2019
Isa Genzken received the 2019 Nasher Prize, awarded every April by the Nasher Sculpture Center, in Dallas. Inaugurated in 2015 and judged by a panel of jurors including artists, museum directors, art historians, and curators, the prize recognizes artists making an “extraordinary impact” on the understanding of sculptural form. This year’s jury included artists Phyllida Barlow and Huma Bhabha; Lynne Cooke, senior curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; art historian Briony Fer; and Hou Hanru, artistic director of the MAXXI, in Rome.
"We’d be hard pressed to name an artist with a more textured and dynamic sculptural practice than Isa Genzken," says Nasher Director Jeremy Strick. "Her work not only straddles an array of forms that complicate and enrich our understanding of sculpture, she also consistently challenges the way an artist’s career and oeuvre might look, breaking apart the notion of specialization within an individual studio practice. Her work can feel utterly urgent and visceral—fraught with emotion—while at other times, objects are rendered with such precision as to seem devoid of human touch. This range of material and conceptual rigor has positioned Genzken as a major influence on younger generations of artists working today amid the clamor of the digital age, offering permission and encouragement to subvert norms and invent new possibilities."
"I have always said that with any sculpture you have to be able to say, although this is not a readymade, it could be one," Genzken explains in a conversation with fellow gallery artist Wolfgang Tillmans in Camera Austria; "That’s what a sculpture has to look like. It must have a certain relation to reality."
The prize was accompanied by related programming during April for Nasher Prize Month. Scheduled events included a graduate symposium and an evening screening of films by Genzken on April 4, and a discussion on April 5 featuring Laura Hoptman, executive director of the Drawing Center; German curator Beatrix Ruf; and artist Simon Denny, about the impact of Genzken’s work.