Jusun Lee to receive the Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2023 for the Academy
Winner of the first prize of the University of Applied Arts Vienna is Marielena Stark.
The Kunsthalle Wien Prize, which is awarded for the ninth time this year, exemplifies Kunsthalle Wien’s longstanding and thriving cooperative relationship with Vienna’s two major art schools. In recent years, the prize has garnered wide recognition as a vital instrument for the promotion of young artists living and working in Vienna; for many prizewinning artists, it has marked a key first step in their careers.
Awarded by a jury to selected graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the Kunsthalle Wien Prize comes with participation in an exhibition and inclusion in the associated publication; one graduate of each school wins the first prize, which comes with an additional cash award of € 3,000.
Jusun Lee won over the jury with the two-part installation Safe Zone and Illusion, which melds a rigorously conceived yet sensual materiality to the study of a subject that is of personal as well as social and political relevance: it invites the visitors into an immersive environment that beckons with safety and comfort while prodding them to reflect on social rejection, safe zones, and self-empowerment. The materials – bioplastic, latex, and metal – are bathed in luscious light and color and coalesce in a singular visual idiom.
Jusun Lee (born in 1992, lives in Vienna and Seoul) studied Sculpture and Installation with Nora Schultz, diploma in June 2023.
Further prizewinners of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna: Željka Aleksić, Michael Amadeus Reindel, Anne Schmidt, and Marc Truckenbrodt
Željka Aleksić
What is the price of becoming an artist? Željka Aleksić asks in her thesis work titled Das Kapital [Capital], which points up the economic conditions required for the privilege of studying art in Vienna when you are the daughter of a working-class family from a so-called third country. Like all of Aleksić’s works, the thesis project, which encompasses a studio diary with documentary photographs and a series of acrylic paintings, is based on personal lived experience and speaks to her flair for social critique and personal irony. The realism of her upbringing resonates in her art as she perceptively grapples with the threshold and tension between her roles as artist and worker in creations that deftly challenge the beholder.
Michael Amadeus Reindel
In Fulfillment Center, Michael Amadeus Reindel has forged a humorous, sophisticated, and astute conjunction of the personal with a profoundly political perspective on the excesses of unbridled global consumerism and the scenes of contemporary precarious labor, here represented by a corporate behemoth: Amazon. Combining his sculptural practice with painstaking research and direct involvement in the form of a one-week stint at the Amazon fulfillment center near his parents’ home, Reindel expertly maneuvers the viewers between his family, reflections on his own work as an artist, and critical observations of society.
Anne Schmidt
Anne Schmidt’s protean œuvre culminates in her thesis installation Strahlte. Geschöpf. Champagner. zottig. Klumpen [Radiated. Creature. Champagne. ragged. Lump], which stars giant ice-cream-cone sculptures, a chainsawed “procrastination pig,” the autofictional novel Me after Two Anal Orgasms, and tennis balls as well as the artist herself. Schmidt’s precise and vigorous engagement with normative images of desire in capitalist consumer society and probing creative scrutiny of institutional logics reflects her background as both an activist and a scholar of culture.
Marc Truckenbrodt
Marc Truckenbrodt’s graphic art typically engages with his immediate surroundings; his observations and reflections often inspire narratives and comic strips without words that blend a compelling light touch with profound insights. For Behauptung [Assertion], his thesis project, which Truckenbrodt executed in colored ink on paper, he chose to grapple with the subject of power, including its contradictions, necessities, and dangers, and selected a comparatively large format: the beholders encounter five larger-than-life figures whose stature and demeanor at first blush suggest superheroes – closer inspection, however, reveals details through which the artist has endowed his characters with a productive ambivalence.