Opening: Thursday 13 December, 19:00
Exhibition: 14.12.2018 – 17.02.2019
Location: TENT Rotterdam
At the request of the Rotterdam artist Dolf Henkes (1903-1989), a part of his estate has been allocated to this stimulation award for artists who are just as iconic for the city of Rotterdam as the name giver himself used to be. At the initiative of the Henkes Foundation, the Dolf Henkes Award has been granted since 2004 to visual artists who give weight to the Rotterdam art. Previous award winners were Jeroen Eisinga, Erik van Lieshout, Melvin Moti, Lara Almarcegui, Gyz La Rivière, Lidwien van de Ven and Katarina Zdjelar: all of them well respected and internationally orientated artists.
This year's Dolf Henkes Award nominees
Artists Roxette Capriles, Priscila Fernandes, Emma van der Leest, and Evelyn Taocheng Wang are the nominees for the Dolf Henkes Prize 2019. The Henkes Foundation biannually awards the prize to an iconic Rotterdam artist. The jury, led by Fons Hof, nominated the four artists for the €12,000 prize. From Friday 14 December 2018 to Sunday 17 February 2019, an exhibition of the nominees’ work takes place at TENT. The winner will be announced on Thursday 7 February 2019, 18:00h at TENT during Art Rotterdam.
Roxette Capriles (Curaçao, 1993) graduated from the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam in 2016 and as an alumnus of the IBB (Instituto Buena Bista, Curaçao Center for Contemporary Art) worked on the last two editions of the Kunsthal’s ‘All you can Art’ summer school project. You are welcome to visit Roxette's autobiographical performance play Bling vs. Reality in TENT Rotterdam on December 21.
Priscila Fernandes (Portugal, 1981) has participated in several international exhibitions and currently coordinates the artist residencies at Het Wilde Weten in Rotterdam. Past exhibitions include at TENT, the São Paulo Biennial, the Reykjavik Art Museum, and Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. In 2011 she received the Prix de Rome Basic Prize for Visual Arts.
Emma van der Leest (the Netherlands, 1991) is a bio-artist working with processes and organisms, such as bacteria, mushrooms, and cells in biotechnology. Van der Leest is the founder and creative director of BlueCity Lab, a biotechnology company and laboratory, located in the former Rotterdam swimming pool Tropicana, which experiments with dry and wet materials. In 2015, she graduated Cum Laude in Product Design from the Willem de Kooning Academy.
Evelyn Taocheng Wang (China, 1981) won the Volkskrant Contemporary Art Prize and the Dorothea von Stetten Art Award in Germany, both in 2016. In her series ‘Massage Near Me’, she shared her experiences of working at a Chinese massage parlour in Amsterdam’s Red Light District. Wang was trained in traditional Chinese painting and studied art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and De Ateliers in Amsterdam.
This year’s jury – Fons Hof (director Art Rotterdam), Ingrid Commandeur (art critic and Course Director MA Education in Art, Piet Zwarte Institute), Tirzo Martha (sculptor and performance artist), and Katarina Zdjelar (winner Dolf Henkes Prize 2016) – gave the following statement on the nomination:
“Our selection was made from a large array of artists who are connected to the city of Rotterdam or Curaçao and sometimes to both. The dynamism and versatility were striking, and the jury’s choice reflects the wealth of different positions. Overlaps with design and science, youthful radicality of the image, unadorned social engagement, and self-discovery in a globalised world are all aspects of the contemporary art practices conveyed by this year’s Dolf Henkes Prize nominees.”
The Dolf Henkes Prize is an initiative of the Henkes Foundation. The foundation’s objectives include the promotion of a favourable climate for art in Rotterdam. The Dolf Henkes Prize 2019 is made possible by the Henkes Foundation, the National Cultural Heritage Agency, Stichting Stokroos and TENT, a department of the CBK Rotterdam.