Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles has won the Roswitha Haftmann Prize, becoming the first Latin American artist to do so since its founding in 2001. The honor, which comes with a no-commitment cash grant of 150,000 francs Swiss (about $174,000), is named after the late Swiss merchant Roswitha Haftmann and is administered by the Kunsthaus Zürich. It is Europe’s largest prize and is usually awarded in recognition of an artist’s lifetime achievement.
“The jury was impressed by the artist’s exceptional talent for engaging his audience both intellectually and emotionally with politically charged and aesthetically compelling works,” said Roswitha Haftmann Foundation Board Member Yilmaz Dziewior. .
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1948, Meireles, over a career spanning six decades, became known for his massive installations responding to oppression in Brazil and inviting interaction from the viewer. First making works on paper, he is fascinated by the concept of the ephemeral and by the non-object and its relationship to space and the viewer, then turns to sculpture and installation. One of his first projects in this vein, 1968’s “virtual spaces” featured environments fashioned to resemble corners within rooms. Among the works for which he is best known are Red offset, 1967-1984, a three-piece blood-red installation frequently described as political art by critics, but characterized by Meireles as emblematic of both chromatic and physical change or displacement; the “Insertion into Ideological Circuits” series, 1970–, in which he scribbled anti-capitalist messages on objects such as Coca-Cola bottles and Brazilian currency in order to comment on consumerism and the circulation and exchange of information ; And babela 2001 installation comprising a massive tower of televisions simultaneously broadcasting different programs in different languages.
