THIS IS A WOMEN'S WORLD. 10 YEARS OF THE WOMEN'S ART AWARD
Since 2001, the Women’s Art Prize Foundation has awarded a prize worth CHF 10,000 to female artists based in the canton of Bern, or in exceptional cases in neighboring cantons, in recognition of their entire body of work. In the exhibition marking the 10th anniversary of the Women’s Art Prize Foundation at the Kunstmuseum Thun, the 2012 prize winner Olivia Notaro and all former prize winners – Angela Zwahlen (2001), Klodin Erb (2002), Katrin Hotz (Fischbau 2003), Adela Picón (2004), Béatrice Gysin (2005), Eva Baumann (2006), Sylvia Hostettler (2007), Mingjun Luo (2008), and Barbara Meyer Cesta (2009) are exhibiting their current works. Parallel to this, a selection of portraits of women from the Kunstmuseum Thun collection by Klara Borter, Marguerite Frey-Surbek, Helene Pflugshaupt, Trudy Schlatter, and Ruth Stauffer. This presentation honors the achievements of women who had to fight for recognition as artists in a male-dominated art scene at the beginning of the 20th century. The exhibition pays special attention to the work of female artists and their changing social status.
The anniversary exhibition showcases the diversity of different techniques such as painting, photography, video, installation, and drawing, as well as the styles and themes of the artists. Visitors to the exhibition can witness secret reading circles and a chase in the desert, enter interiors, watch the changing seasons, linger by mountain lakes, or marvel at cobwebs and glittering jewelry. This year’s award winner, Olivia Notaro, continues to develop the found portrait of a woman, Present #3 (2012), during the exhibition: she copies necklaces, earrings, brooches, and decorative buttons from existing portraits in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Thun and incorporates them into the portrait in a painterly manner. An accumulation of jewelry from different eras and contexts is thus gifted to this woman, whereby Olivia Notaro’s approach is not only to be understood conceptually. Equally central is the execution—the material, brushwork, and application of paint are precisely matched to the original model. The artist applies traditional technique with her painterly interventions in a very contemporary sense.
The project space enter is showing current works by this year’s nominees for the Women’s Art Prize, Salomé Bäumlin and Renée Magaña.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with numerous illustrations and articles by Barbara Berger, research assistant at the Kunstmuseum Thun; Helen Hirsch, director of the Kunstmuseum Thun; Dr. Matthias Jungck, founder of the Women’s Art Prize; and Marianne Pitzen, founder and director of the Women’s Museum in Bonn, in order to place the prize and related topics such as the advancement of women, gender issues, and equality goals in a broader international context.
