Icelandic artist Eggert Pétursson has been awarded the second prize of the Carnegie Art Award 2006 though he and the other winners will not actually receive their prizes until the award exhibition opens at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter near Oslo on September 28. The first prise went to Karin Mamma Andersson from Sweden and Sirous Namazi from Finland was in third place. Twenty-one Nordic artists were selected by the jury and the three winners top the list which included three other Icelanders, Steingrímur Eyfjörð, Jón Óskar and Finnbogi Pétursson. This is not the first time an Icelandic artists wins a prize here; Hreinn Friðfinnsson also came second in 2000.
The award was set up in 1998 by the Swedish investment company D. Carnegie & Co. to promote outstanding Nordic artists and promote painting in the Nordic countries. The award is now made every other year and the award exhibition tours museums in all the Nordic countries. The 2004 show could also be seen in the Victoria Miro Warehouse in London in September of that year. Financially, the award is among the richest on offer in the art world with a prize purse of 2,100,000 Swedish Kroner (approximately 220,000 Euros). Second prize comes to 600,000 Swedish Kroner.
Eggert’s paintings of tiny flowers that more or less uniformly cover the canvas have been charming viewers and confounding critics for years. As Eggert himself describes these works they would seem to turn mostly on process – the way in which he teases forth the shapes of flowers from the canvas with layered brushstrokes of colour, sometimes barely perceptible under layers of white. As he himself has said of these paintings: “One can easily get lost in the details without ever achieving a complete perception.”
Born in 1956, Eggert was among the students at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts in the late 1970 when Magnús Pálsson was introducing students to Fluxus, happenings and other new approaches to art. Dieter Roth acted as a kind of godfather to this generation of artists and many went on to work with him and his extensive contacts helped introduce them to the wider art world. Robert Filliou, Dick Higgins and many others came to Iceland to teach, to visit with Dieter and to exhibit or perform at Galleri Suðurgata 7 – an artist-run, multi-disciplinary art space where Eggert was an active participant even while still a student at the College. Eggert then continued his studies at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Holland and has exhibited regularly since. Though the paintings for which Eggert has now received the award have no clear art-historical precedent (or too many for any of them to be very helpful), they are prefigured already in his early work in the 1970 with delicate tracings and drawings that achieve their conceptual thrust with a minimum of fuss – quiet but utterly engaging.
The 2006 Carnegie Awards Jury consisted of Ina Blom of the University of Oslo, Maaretta Jaukkuri of Kiasma in Finland, Lars Nittve of the Modern Museeum in Stockholm, Halldór Björn Runólfsson of the Iceland Academy of the Arts, Poul Erik Tøjner of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and Suzanne Pagé of the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
JP
See also: issue #6
