On Monday, October 7th, Pipilotti Rist will receive the prestigious 2024 Sikkens Prize, which includes a €75,000 award, during a celebratory event at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen and Kunsthal Rotterdam. The jury commends the renowned Swiss artist for her exceptional use of color and her pioneering role in video art, which has inspired and paved the way for younger generations.
The Sikkens Prize highlights artists and organisations that are pioneering in terms of colour. The award is a token of recognition and appreciation for exceptional achievements in which colour is key and which have transformative impact on society. The prize is awarded every two years, the first time in 1959 to architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld and the last time (2022) to landscape architect Piet Oudolf. The award winners include artists Donald Judd and Bridget Riley, designer Hella Jongerius, architects David Chipperfield, Adriaan Geuze and Le Corbusier and poet Seamus Heaney. Exceptions among the award winners were the hippies because of their colorful contribution to society and HEMA stores because of the remarkable application of colour in products and shop decor.
The work of leading, award-winning Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist is as colourful as her personality. Since her graduation project, the video I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much, she has gained international fame with immersive, surreal, hallucinatory and dreamy video installations. Her artist name refers to Pippi Longstocking. Just like the heroine from Astrid Lindgren’s stories, Rist sees herself as a woman who explores and imagines the world in a playful and colourful way. Rist commented on the use of colour in her work as follows: “Colour is the fundamental element of my artworks. From the vibrant hues to the subtle and ‘broken or dirty’ washes, colour creates mood and atmosphere.”
Her work has been on display at numerous exhibitions worldwide since the mid-1980s. Over the past decade, she has had solo exhibitions in Doha, New York, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Kyoto, Humlebæk, Sidney and Zurich, among others. All exhibitions attracted a record number of visitors to the museums. A major retrospective is planned for the summer of 2025 in Beijing. In the Netherlands, the retrospective exhibition Elixer was held at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in 2009. In 2021, Rist created the beloved artwork Wasting Life on You, a mix of video and environmental art, for the entrance to the Boijmans van Beuningen Depot. Her work can also be seen in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Centraal Museum Utrecht.
The amount of money associated with the Sikkens Prize has been 75.000 euros since this year, an increase of 50.000 euros compared to previous years. Of this, 50.000 euros is intended for personal development and 25.000 euros for the realisation of a special project around colour. Rist spends her prize money, among other things, on Safety Curtain from museum in progress. Every year, this Austrian art organisation asks a renowned artist to transform the curtain of the Vienna State Opera into a work of art. After, among others, Anselm Kiefer, David Hockney, Cy Twombly and Jeff Koons, Rist was asked for the 2024 edition.
About
Pipilotti Rist, a pioneer of spatial video art, was born 1962 in Grabs in the Swiss Rhine Valley on the Austrian Border and has been a central figure within the international art scene since the mid-1980s. Astounding the art world with the energetic exorcistic statement of her now famous single channel videos, such as ‘I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much,’ 1986 and ‘Pickelporno,’ 1992, her artistic work has co-developed with technical advancements and in playful exploration of its new possibilities to propose footage resembling a collective brain. Through large video projections and digital manipulation, she has developed immersive installations that draw life from slow caressing showers of vivid color tones, like her works ‘Sip My Ocean,’ 1996 or ‘Worry Will Vanish,’ 2014.
For Rist, showing vulnerability is a sign of strength on which she draws for inspiration. With her curious and lavish recordings of nature (to which humans belong as an animal), and her investigative editing, Rist seeks to justify the privileged position we are born with, simply by being human. Her installations and exhibition concepts are expansive, finding within the mind, senses and body the possibility for endless discovery and poetical invention. ‘Pixel Forest,’ 2016, made from 3,000 thousand LEDs hung on strings, resembles a movie screen that has exploded into the room, allowing viewers an immersive walk through 3-dimensional video. As she herself puts it, ‘beside the energy-intensive exploration of the geographical world, pictures, films and sounds have been and are the spaces into which we can escape… The projector is the flamethrower, the space is the vortex and you are the pearl within.’
Since 1984, Rist has had countless solo and group exhibitions, and video screenings worldwide. Her recent solo exhibitions are ‘Electric Idyll’ at the Fire Station Doha (2024), ‘Prickling Goosebumps & A Humming Horizon’ at Hauser & Wirth New York and Luhring Augustine Chelsea (2023–2024), ‘Behind Your Eyelid’ at Tai Kwun Hong Kong (2022), ‘Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor’ at The Geffen Contemporary, MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2021–2022), ‘Your Eye Is My Island’ at MoMAK, The National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto and ART TOWER MITO (2021). ‘Åbn min Lysning. Open my Glade’ at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Humlebæk Denmark (2019), ‘Sip My Ocean’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney (2017–2018), ‘Pixel Forest’ at New Museum New York (2016–2017) and ‘Your Saliva is My Diving Suit of the Ocean of Pain’ at Kunsthaus Zürich (2016), all resulted in record-breaking attendance numbers for each institution. A major exhibition is planned for summer 2025 at UCCA Beijing.
The Sikkens Foundation wants to make the public aware of the importance of colour in our lives. With publications, among others, the Mondrian Lecture and the presentation of the Sikkens Prize, the foundation, founded in 1972, contributes to the development of knowledge about the application of colour. The board members of the foundation have earned their spurs in the world of art, culture and science. The current board consists of: Hester Alberdingk Thijm, Karin Amatmoekrim, Lennart Booij (chairman), Niek Koppen, Annet Lekkerkerker, Stephan Petermann, Violette Schönberger, Maarten de Vries and Ben Zweers. The Sikkens Foundation is an independent foundation that is financially supported by AkzoNobel.
