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Swiss Grand Prix Art / Prix Meret Oppenheim 2025

5. February 2025

This is the 25th time that the Federal Office of Culture has awarded the Swiss Grand Prix Art / Prix Meret Oppenheim to outstanding Swiss artists on the recommendation of the Federal Art Commission - including the architect, architectural theorist and professor emeritus of architecture Miroslav Šik. His buildings include the Bürgerhuus in Haldenstein.

Felix Lehner - art caster and creative companion

Felix Lehner (*1960, St. Gallen) opened his first foundry at the age of 22. In 1994, he moved his factory to the halls of the former textile dye works in the Sittertal. Today, Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen employs over 80 specialists in a wide range of craft trades. Since its foundation, the foundry has developed into a cornerstone of the Swiss art scene and works with internationally renowned artists as well as galleries and museums all over the world.

Felix Lehner has turned the Kunstgiesserei into a place of production and material research with dedication and passion. Here, know-how and customized technical processes - from high-tech to craftsmanship - are invented and cultivated with and for the artists. For over forty years, Felix Lehner and his teams have been supporting artists at every stage of their creative process. In 2006, he co-founded the Sitterwerk Foundation, a public center for art and art production that includes a scientific library, a materials archive and a studio house with living quarters. In 2012, a branch of the foundry was opened in Shanghai with 15 employees.

Pamela Rosenkranz - an artist between skin and world

Pamela Rosenkranz (*1979, Altdorf) graduated from Bern University of the Arts and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam from 2010 to 2012. Her multidisciplinary work mainly comprises installation, sculpture, readymade and painting. Her unique artistic work, innovative in form and content, enjoys great international recognition. She is best known for her use of synthetic materials that recreate an idealized nature. Within contemporary art production, Pamela Rosenkranz's work is a unique and unmistakable contribution to the philosophical and scientific understanding of man and nature, which has been undergoing radical change in recent years.

In 2015, Pamela Rosenkranz represented Switzerland at the 56th Venice Biennale with the multi-sensory installation Our Product. A viscous, pink, fragrant liquid filled the Swiss pavilion. In 2023, she unveiled her important public tree sculpture Old Tree, a red and pink structure reminiscent of organic structures, on the High Line Plinth in New York. Pamela Rosenkranz' works have been exhibited in the following institutions (selection): Centre d'art contemporain, Geneva (2010), Kunsthalle Basel (2012), Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015), K21 Düsseldorf (2017) and Kunsthaus Bregenz (2021). Her works are in the collections of the Center Georges Pompidou and the MoMa in New York. In May 2025, she will have a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum (Netherlands).

Miroslav Šik - Architecture in imperfect harmony

Miroslav Šik (*1953 in Prague) is an architect, architectural theorist and professor emeritus of architecture. He taught as a professor at ETH Zurich for an extraordinary 60 semesters. Miroslav Šik is one of the most important representatives of "analog architecture". He uses realistic depictions of architecture (chalk drawings) to combine existing references with alienating elements, but he rejects both postmodernism and classical modernism. This approach, theorized in the 1980s, had a profound impact on Swiss architecture and influenced its most outstanding representatives.

Šik's "Altneu" works are characterized by one common feature: the unconditional acceptance of the existing. His buildings, such as the Hôtel de la Longeraie in Morges, the Bürgerhuus in Haldenstein or the Saint-Antoine parish center in Egg, fit into their context without extravagance and combine old and new. Šik has been teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague since 2018. The Šik Partner office is based in Zurich. In 2024, Šik received the State Prize of the Czech Ministry of Culture.

Swiss Grand Prix Art / Prix Meret Oppenheim

Since 2001, the Swiss Grand Prix Art / Prix Meret Oppenheim has honored personalities who are active in the fields of art, architecture, criticism, publishing or exhibitions. The awards are endowed with CHF 40,000 each. The Swiss Grand Prix Art / Prix Meret Oppenheim 2025 will be awarded together with the Swiss Art Awards as part of the Swiss Art Awards exhibition on June 16, 2024 in Basel.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a work with unpublished interviews with Ursula Badrutt and Felix Lehner, Bice Curiger and Pamela Rosenkranz, Lukas Imhof and Miroslav Šik, as well as three films presenting the prizewinners and their work. The Swiss Art Awards exhibition at Messe Basel, Hall 1.1, will open on June 16, 2024. The exhibition will take place during Art Basel from June 17 to 22, 2025.

Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.