The New York-based artist Anicka Yi has been awarded the 2016 Hugo Boss Prize. The artist accepted the $100,000 prize at a glitzy ceremony at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum October 20. She will also show a solo exhibition at the museum as part of the prestigious prize, opening in April 2017.
Beating out fellow nominees Tania Bruguera, Mark Leckey, Ralph Lemon, Laura Owens, and Wael Shawky, Yi took home the biannual prize, which honors artists whose work is among the most innovative and influential in the contemporary art world.
Yi, who was born in 1971 in Seoul, is known for her work with scents, and tactile multimedia sculpture and installations.
Hugo Boss CEO Mark Langer, prize winner Anicka Yi, and Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong at the Guggenheim on October 20. Photo by Neilson Barnard for HUGO BOSS, courtesy Getty Images.
“We are particularly compelled by the way Yi’s sculptures and installations make public and strange, and thus newly addressable, our deeply subjective corporeal realities,” said the jury in a statement.
“We also admire the unique embrace of discomfort in her experiments with technology, science, and the plant and animal worlds, all of which push at the limits of perceptual experience in the ‘visual’ arts. The artist gives material and olfactory form to complex networks of ideas, imbuing her unusual materials with both political and psychological urgency.”
Selected guests and members of the press were invited to a celebration of the finalists on Thursday night, which culminated in the announcement of the winner by the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, Richard Armstrong, and Hugo Boss chairman and CEO, Mark Langer.
At the reception, Hollywood stars Kate Bosworth, Zachary Quinto, and supermodel Toni Garrn rubbed shoulders with former winners Rirkrit Tiravanija and Danh Vo, while dealers Gavin Brown, Paula Cooper, and Andrea Rosen mingled with curator Jens Hoffmann and collector Tiffany Zabludowicz.
The award was presented at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Photo: STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images.
This year the winner was chosen by a five person international jury, featuring Guggenheim curator Katherine Brinson, ICA Boston senior curator Dan Myers, Kunsthalle Basel director Elena Filipovic, Artforum editor-in-chief Michelle Kuo, and the Guggenheim’s Latin American art curator Pablo León de la Barra.
Celebrating it’s 20th anniversary this year, the prize has honored 10 artists, including Matthew Barney (1996), Douglas Gordon (1998), Marjetica Potrč (2000), Pierre Huyghe (2002), Rirkrit Tiravanija (2004), Tacita Dean (2006), Emily Jacir (2008), Hans-Peter Feldmann (2010), Danh Võ (2012), and Paul Chan (2014).