PAPER ART AWARD 2023
PAPER ART AWARD
IN GOLD
URSULA SAX
Ursula Sax, born in Backnang, Baden-Württemberg in 1935, is an icon of sculpture. She began her studies in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart at the age of 15, which she supplemented with further studies with Hans Uhlmann in Berlin from 1955 to 60. She was part of international solo and group exhibitions and created numerous works related to architecture and urban space. Furthermore, she held guest professorships at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin and professorships in Braunschweig and Dresden from 1990 to 2000. Her work from and on paper was honoured in 2021 by a large solo exhibition at Semjon Contemporary and by the same-named publication "Ursula Sax - aus und auf Papier".
Ursula Sax worked with a wide range of materials throughout her creative period. In doing so, she elicited typical properties from each, while simultaneously experimenting with and exploring the limits of the materials. Her work transcends media and ranges from stone, bronze, iron and stainless steel to porcelain and wool. In particular, her approach to sculptural work in relation to the surrounding space, thinking around the corner, in which the sculpture is developed from all sides, is one of the best known features of Sax's work since the late 1950s.
PAPER ART AWARD
IN SILBER
GISOO KIM
Born in Korea, Gisoo Kim studied sculpture in Seoul and then moved to Germany at the age of 24.
She then devoted herself to studying free art in Hamburg and Düsseldorf. The artist has already participated in numerous exhibitions in Germany as well as internationally, and has received awards for her art.
In her works, Gisoo Kim combines spatial paper works with net-like and fine structures. After printing, she works on her photographs with needle and thread to put the two-dimensional effect into a new context.
When creating new realities, it is important to her to sew the individual pictorial objects by hand and to create connections to each other that did not exist before. In the process, new levels and structures emerge that complete her works in an extraordinary way.
PAPER ART AWARD
IN SILBER
AMPARO SARD
Amparo Sard was born in Mallorca, Spain in 1976. She studied both in Barcelona, Spain and in New York, USA. She has been honoured internationally with several awards and won the Silver Paper Art Award at Paper Positions 2023 for her spiked paper work.
In her development as an artist, she explored the new workings of modernity. In particular, the extent to which the human being is pushed to its limits in order to cope with the ever rapidly evolving environment. Her later work involved a range of media and materials. She created large fibreglass installations as well as aluminium sculptures, worked with epoxy resin as well as videos and sculptures made from recycled plastic to create images.
PAPER ART AWARD
IN BRONZE
Ken'ichiro Taniguchi (谷口 顕一郎)
The artist Ken'ichiro Taniguchi was born in 1976 in Sapporo, Japan. He lives and works in Berlin and Sapporo. He has established himself as an international artist through numerous groups as well as solo exhibitions.
At Paper Position 2023, where the artist received the Bronze Paper Art Award, Mikiko Sato Gallery showed a series of works on paper that Taniguchi has been pursuing since 2006.
Ken'ichiro Taniguchi unfolds cracks from public spaces. Whether in the form of furrows in the asphalt or "valleys" dug into the plaster of walls, the source material that has been shaped into cracks is translated into spatial sculptures in a technically and technically complex process. The "Hecomi", as they are called in Japanese, have been the focus of the Berlin-based Japanese artist's work since 2000.
PAPER ART AWARD
IN BRONZE
Brian Dettmer
Brian Dettmer was born in Chicago in the United States in 1974. He is one of the leading artists in the global art space, working with sculpturally transformed books. His work has been shown in a total of 25 solo exhibitions over the last 20 years, in international galleries and institutions.
At the beginning of his process, he closes the edges of the book. He then works his way through the pages from the front of the book using knives, tweezers and surgical tools. Through precise cutting work, Brian Dettmer creates abstract scenarios within the books and transforms the object into media masterpieces. Through the diversity of his motifs, he moves away from the decorative and gives the books a new space to exist. Whether coloured or black and white, his colour palette is indeterminate.
Artist statement:
Information is the raw material of today. We have an overabundance of text and imagery constantly at our fingertips. In digital media, it is often as fleeting as it is abundant, but when information is put in print we have a stronger sense of its relation to history and its stability for the future. In my work, I question this stability and ask what erasure and loss could look like through the lens of printed matter. Reference books have become almost extinct in less than one generation and we are at a pivotal time in the way we record and distribute facts. Without a stable home to rest in, our agreed truths have been uprooted and are now subject to distortions, erasures, and intentional manipulations.
Through a meticulous process of sculptural excavation, I explore the inner contents of vintage books that have often been relegated to collecting dust or headed for a landfill. The work is both archival and anti-archival. It is a creation through consumption, an exposure through erasure. These sculptures break down historic narratives to offer a compression of ideas through a single surface, embracing us with a desire to reconstruct. This abundance of fragmented history reminds us that we are just one part of the bigger picture, as fleeting as the media we create and as permanent as the ideas we surround ourselves with.
PAPER ART AWARD 2022
PAPER ART AWARD
IN GOLD
AFSHAN DANESHVAR
Afshan Daneshvar (geb. 1972 in Teheran) ist eine in San Francisco lebende bildende Künstlerin.
Afshans meditative Arbeiten sind von Siah-mashgh, persischen kalligrafischen Übungsblättern, inspiriert - eine Kunst in der sie ihr Vater unterrichtete. Wörter und Buchstaben werden ohne Rücksicht auf ihre Bedeutung wiederholt, um Perfektion zu erreichen. Seit 2015 erforscht sie das Medium Papier.
In Afshans Arbeiten gibt es einen direkten Dialog zwischen Inhalt und Form. Wiederholung ist die Essenz ihrer Werke, und durch Wiederholung verbindet sie Vergangenheit und Zukunft. Die Gegenwart wird ständig in den Vordergrund gebracht.
Sie hat an zahlreichen Ausstellungen in Europa und im Nahen Osten teilgenommen und wird derzeit von der O Gallery in Teheran vertreten.
PAPER ART AWARD
IN SILBER
GOEKHAN ERDOGAN
Goekhan Erdogan was born in Frankfurt am Main Höchst in 1978 as the son of Turkish immigrants and grew up in simple working-class conditions. After several attempts, he completed his art studies with an academy diploma at the HFBK Frankfurt am Main in 2008, obtained a diploma with distinction at the HFG Offenbach in 2012, where he deepened his engagement with media-sociological post-structural texts in a postgraduate course in 2014.
Since 2009, he has been regularly represented in exhibitions at home and abroad, e.g. in 2009 at the then Berlin-based Galerie Feinkost with Dorothee Iannone, Mike Kelley, among others, or in 2012 in Bergamo at the Galerie Thomas Brambilla, whose programme includes the historical artist Lynda Benglis, Klaus Rinke and the Kandinsky Prize winner Anatoly Osmolowsky.
Recently, he has taken part more consistently in exhibitions in art associations and museums. The latter are often occupied with sculptural self-portraits made of paper, which negotiate the dissolving identity of metropolitan individuals in the form of photo objects, paper reliefs or photo sculpture.
Erdogan is currently represented by the Heike Strelow Gallery in Frankfurt am Main.
PAPER ART AWARD
IN BRONZE
AJA VON LOEPER
Aja von Loeper (born 1971 in Leonberg-Warmbronn ) studied fine art painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg. She has been represented in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in Europe and Asia, including Haus der Kunst Munich, Albrecht Dürer Haus Nuremberg, Stadtmuseum Erlangen, Museum Rijkswijk (NL) and Fengxian Museum Shanghai (CN). Aja von Loeper has received several prizes and awards. She is represented by Galerie Wichtendahl in Berlin, among others.
Aja von Loeper needs a white sheet of paper, flat cardboard underneath and a wooden tool she has developed to create her relief-like "White Sheets". She works on the paper with great force and sensitivity, compressing it with her tool until it curves, partially revealing its structures and revealing the inner, radiant white of the paper. The sheet becomes a relief with an intangible plasticity. The different textures form delicate shades of chiaroscuro in dialogue with the light. Aja von Loeper's "White Sheets" appear quiet and fragile, at the same time weighty and powerful.
PAPER ART AWARD
IN BRONZE
LISA TIEMANN
Lisa Tiemann (*1981 in Kassel) is a sculptor based in Berlin. Her sculptural works stretch themselves, they bend and arch, and interact – with their surroundings, with the beholders, and with each other. In the series COUPLES that Lisa Tiemann has been developing since 2016 she engages with the tension between two elements of different materiality and explores the limits of material properties, stability, and gravity. This subject is the focus of her artistic practice. She questions our understanding of connection as fractures, gaps, and shifts are fundamental elements of her understanding of unity. Tiemann’s sculptures are developed from a drawn gesture: a simple line that develops through several preliminary studies and in the end is translated from paper into space. She earned her master’s degree from Universität der Künste in Berlin where she studied from 2022 to 2008. Her works have been exhibited at Kommunale Galerie and Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin, Gewerbemuseum, Winterthur, Halberstadt Biennale, Stephanie Kelly, Dresden. Her work is currently on view at her gallery SCHWARZ CONTEMPORARY in Berlin and at lokal_30 in Warsaw. Outdoor sculptures have been shown at Skulpturenpark Schlosspark Stammheim in Cologne and at Skulpturenpark Eisenberg (AT). Her works will be part of the ruru Haus programme at this year's documenta fifteen (2022).
PAPER ART AWARD 2021
PAPER ART AWARD
IN GOLD
FIENE SCHARP
Fiene Scharp (born 1984 in Berlin) studied Fine Arts and Literature at the UdK Berlin University of the Arts and the Humboldt University in Berlin. In 2012, she received the UdK President’s Fine Arts Award. She took part in numerous exhibitions in Europe, North America, and Asia, including Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Kunsthalle Bremerhaven, London Center for Recent Drawing and Stedelijk Museum 's-Hertogenbosch (NL). Her works are part of public art collections such as Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings) of the Berlin State Museums or the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.
Fiene Scharp has received several awards and grants, including a scholarship from the Else Heiliger Fund of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the Stiftung Kunstfonds. She is represented by the gallery Kuckei + Kuckei in Berlin.
Fiene Scharp, Artist Statement:
My work includes repetitive long-term drawings as well as detailed cut paper works and image objects that I regard in the context of the drawing.
The delicate structures hang unframed, in slight movement on the wall, and only stand out from the background through gradual shading.
I transfer two-dimensional raster drawings into three-dimensional space through the process of microscopical cut outs of the spaces in between.
My focus lies of the minimum variance in the repetition.
PAPER ART AWARD
IN SILBER
ASTRID BUSCH
Astrid Busch (born 1968 in Krefeld) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and the Berlin-Weißensee School of Art, where she was master student of Prof. Katharina Grosse. She took part in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including in Germany, France, Russia, the USA, and Brazil. Her works are in public art collections such as Kunststiftung NRW, Düsseldorf; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and Museum of Technology, Berlin; Museum of Applied Art, Gera, the Artothek in Nuremberg.
Astrid Busch has received numerous awards and grants.
She is represented by the Rupert Pfab gallery in Düsseldorf.
Astrid Busch transforms rooms in their entirety, but takes a gentle and almost reserved approach in doing so. In her site-specific room installations, she combines photographs with a wide variety of materials – from her own images to archive finds. She assembles all of these parts into multimedia and multilayered productions, creating space-consuming works that look like a mosaic, and yet always remain site-specific.
PAPER ART AWARD
IN BRONZE
ANGELA GLAJCAR
Angela Glajcar (born 1970 in Mainz) studied Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and was master student of Tim Scott. Yet she soon broke away from classic materials such as steel and wood. Her works, based on the use of white sheets of paper, are unusual and bizarre and striking in their radical purism. (Margareta Sandhofer)
She has received numerous grants and awards such as the Mainz ZONTA Art Prize, the Emy Roeder Award, the Phönix Art Award or the Audience Award of the Regionale in the Wilhelm Hack Museum Ludwigshafen in 2010. Her works took part in solo and group exhibitions at museums, galleries and various cultural venues in Germany, Italy, the USA, and Hong Kong. She also realized several Percent for Art projects.
Angela Glajcar is represented by the Nanna Preußners gallery in Hamburg, among others.
Angela Glajcar creates flowing installations from torn paper webs, which gain a three-dimensional presence through layers and curves. Through the incident light, they develop into bodies that seem to shine from the inside. She tears holes in the middle of the strips, which allow views and depths of perspective in the spatial structure, or lets the straight and clean edges of the paper fray generously in order to expose the internal structure of the material. The interplay of light and shadow transforms the artworks into a multidimensional piece with an atmospheric effect. Contrasts such as lightness and weight, calm and dynamism, beauty and destruction get manifested within.