13 — 17 September 2023
In 2000, Aurelie Nemours decided to create an annual prize that bears her name. The Aurelie Nemours Prize rewards any artist, regardless of his discipline, whose work pursues the rigorous and spiritual plastic quest that has been his. She wrote: "Thinking that art is a struggle against the disarray of our civilization, I firmly believe that the spiritual charge of art is the only recourse and salvation."
Previous winners:
— 2000 Julije Knifer
— 2001 Imi Knoebel
— 2002 Adalberto Mecarelli
— 2007 Bernard Aubertin
— 2008 Helmut Federle
— 2011 Cécile Bart
— 2013 Didier Vermeiren
— 2016 Jean-François Dubreuil
— 2018 Philippe Decrauzat
— 2020 Esther Stocker
— 2021 Pe Lang & Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri
The jury of the prize is made up of members of the Nemours Cultural Association.
In 2023, two artists will be rewarded: graphic designer Irma Boom and painter Hans-Jörg Glattfelder.
For more information on the Aurelie Nemours Prize, click here.
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Aurelie Nemours, Structure du silence, 1983
Oil on canvas, 80 x 80 cm
The 2021 winning artists
Irma Boom
For the first time since its creation in 2000, the Aurelie Nemours Prize was awarded to an artist working in the field of graphic design.
Irma Boom, born in 1960, is an internationally renowned Dutch graphic designer who has manifested herself through her office, Irma Boom Office founded in 1991, in the most varied sectors of activity, from poster to signage, from the layout of books to their own design, from printed paper to moving images: she has particularly distinguished herself in the field of books and catalogues, which she thinks of as a total work of art whose all the constituent elements interfere.
Irma Boom is a continuation of the Dutch school marked by the constructivist spirit, where Theo Van Doesburg, Piet Zwart, Paul Schuitema, Hendrik-Nikolaas Werkman, then Willem Sandberg, Walter Nikkels, Jan Van Toorn, Wim Crouwel and Karel Martens distinguished themselves from the 1920s.
Irma Boom is the graphic designer of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, for which she recently designed and produced the entire visual program of the Vermeer exhibition, from cartels to posters, from signage to catalogue. In France, she was in charge of the graphic identity of the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, her posters adorning the corridors of the metro and the masts in Paris every year.
She has received numerous international awards, including the prestigious Gutenberg Prize in 2001.
Many institutions have shown his work such as, in 2023, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Vatican Library. Some of his works are in museum collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The art of Irma Boom by its rigor, its inventiveness and its plastic quality is well in the continuity of the pictorial work and the spirit of Aurelie Nemours.
Visual: Portrait of Irma Boom © Ilvy Njiokiktjien
Hans-Jörg Glattfelder
The other winner of the 2023 Prize is Hans-Jörg Glattfelder, a Swiss painter born in 1939 in Zurich, with an international career and who lived in Paris from 1998 to 2014. He works in Basel.
Hans-Jörg Glattfelder is the heir of the great school of Swiss Concrete Art illustrated by Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse, Camille Graeser and Verena Loewensberg. Trained at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich, he belongs to his third generation, which includes Karl Gerstner and Andreas Christen.
His work has been marked by abstraction, the development of a method and the search for movement, particularly through relief forms. From 1977, Hans-Jörg Glattfelder became interested in the representation of space through research on perspective, which led him to play with perspective distortion and to intervene on the form of the painting like Leon Polk Smith, Frank Stella or Robert Mangold, thus creating an ambiguity of perception. He multiplied the variations from the square format on the tip, dear to Mondrian and Max Bill, transforming it into an irregular diamond whose effect is visually intriguing.
In 1987 he received the Camille Graeser Prize from the City of Zurich. In 1992, the Josef-Albers-Museum in Bottrop devoted a retrospective to him, which was confirmed in 2013 by that of the Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich. It is present in the collections of many museums in Europe.
Hans-Jörg Glattfelder is today the most important representative of this major current of geometric abstraction of which Aurelie Nemours was an exemplary figure.
Visual: Hans-Jörg Glattfelder © Museum Ritter
The works of the winning artists
Selection of works by artists
