QSPA presented in Bergen

The Queen Sonja Print Award (QSPA) is awarded to an especially gifted, ambitious and promising artist who works with printmaking. The award is being presented for the third time this year. Previously the award has been reserved for Nordic artists, but this time the QSPA has expanded into the international arena, and the 31 nominated artists represent all five continents.

Tauba Auerbach (born 1981) works within a range of disciplines, including painting, photography and sculpture.

The jury’s statement

The international jury, comprised of artist Martin Puryear and curators Starr Figura and Ute Meta Bauer, had the difficult task of selecting one winner from among the 31 talented candidates. One work from each of the candidates is presented on QSPA.no.

The jury states the following about the winner:

"The jury has been deeply impressed by Tauba Auerbach’s substantial body of work and the way that printmaking and graphic art are fully integrated into her artistic practice. In painting, prints, and artists’ books that are at once conceptually rigorous and visually lush, she focuses on abstract patterns – both random and ordered – to explore the structures of logic and perception. From aquatints that play with the dot patterns used in commercial printing; to screenprints whose abstract patterns she made by combining various typographic elements; to an elaborate pop-up book full of colorful three-dimensional geometries; to an artist’s book whose pages are printed with every possible color in the RBG color scale, her work is consistently engaged with the aesthetic, conceptual, and technical parameters of printing. Issues of reproduction, sequencing, and seriality, so fundamental to printmaking, are also at the heart of her vision. In 2013 she established her own publishing imprint, Diagonal Press, which demonstrates her exceptional commitment to printmaking. The possibilities of publishing as a format in its own right allows Auerbach to maintain artistic autonomy and independent distribution while at the same time allowing her work to reach a broader audience, which is very much within the democratic tradition of printmaking."

Today’s ceremony

The award ceremony took place in Grieghallen in Bergen this afternoon. Queen Sonja gave the opening speech, and after Ute Meta Bauer read the jury’s statement, the Queen herself presented the award to Tauba Auerbach. Musical performances by Ole Edvard Antonsen and Suløen Jazzband were part of the programme, as were film presentations of both the prize winner and the other nominees.

Five-year anniversary

This year is the fifth anniversary of the Queen Sonja Print Award Foundation, which was established to promote graphic art and create a broader understanding of graphic art and the many possibilities inherent in printmaking. The foundation achieves this in part through presentation of the Queen Sonja Print Award and the Kjell Nupen Memorial Grant.

To mark the anniversary, a book is being published about the foundation itself, the 2016 nominees, and the work involved with the exhibition “TEXTURE” – an artistic collaboration between Queen Sonja and Magne Furuholmen. The exhibition opens in Grieghallen this weekend.