Koki Tanaka Named Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year

Japanese, Los Angeles-based artist, Koki Tanaka has been named Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year 2015. The award includes a solo exhibition at Berlin’s Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, which will open in the spring of next year. Tanaka’s practice consists mostly of performative actions and installations that play on objects and situations of everyday life. He represented Japan at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

In awarding Tanaka the prize, Hou Hanru, artistic director of the MAXXI in Rome noted the artist as, “A shrewd observer of the most ‘indifferent’ matters of the everyday,” and, “a savvy mobilizer of collective actions and [who] encourages sharing and exchange among participants to produce a common sense of creativity and imagination while probing new rules of negotiation and collaboration.”

2015 marks the sixth edition of the award by the German bank. Also one of the world’s largest corporate collections of art, Deutsche Bank previously honored Wangechi Mutu, Yto Barrada, Roman Ondák, Imran Qureshi, and Victor Man as Artist of the Year. Man’s exhibition closed on June 22nd.