Peter Kapeller, Sigrid Reingruber and Annemarie Delleg receive the European Art Award for painting and graphic arts by artists with mental disability "euward" of the Augustinum Foundation.
On Thursday 18th November, at 7:00 p.m., the Augustinum Foundation will present the fifth euward - the European Art Award Painting and Graphic Arts by Artists with Mental Disability - at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. euward is the first, and so far the only, distinction of international status to be awarded in this sphere of art. The presentation will also officially launch the exhibition with works by the prize winners and the 22 other nominated artists from eight European countries, which will be on show at the Haus der Kunst until 9th January, 2011.
Here richly detailed and gloomily overcharged soul landscapes, there a young romance told as clear as a bell, and then the repetitive sign language in series, reduced to a single character: with the work of Peter Kapeller, Sigrid Reingruber and Annemarie Delleg the jury has picked out three phenomena of contemporary Outsider art that could hardly be more different. They are the three most distant poles, such as we find time and again in this art, and as they demonstrate their aesthetic and also human bandwidth, wrote Klaus Mecherlein, exhibition curator, about the winners of the euward5.
1st prize: Peter Kapeller
The first prize went to Peter Kapeller, who was born in Vienna in 1969 and still lives there. After attending elementary and secondary school, he began training as a sanitation engineer, which he didn't complete due to a mental crisis. This illness shaped his biography. Kapeller lives and works in a small community flat in Vienna. He creates his drawings and etchings in night sessions lasting hours.
Peter Kapeller seeks to assert himself as artist and person against any form of influence, in an almost suspiciously guarded autonomy. No institution, advisor or critic, no authority is allowed to intervene in his ideas. He has developed his mode of expression from inner necessity, changing it only slightly over the years and reflecting it permanently against his own demands, which he moreover backs up with literary witnesses: "The artist alone determines what his art is and what art is at all." And he doesn't see his art as Art Brut, but as his contribution to a critical subculture, which denounces the scandalous social anomalies, and, with the description of his own "thoroughly awful life" fights a surrogate battle for the preservation of his personal integrity. This is continually called into question from all sides, and threatened with undermining. Threatened by the crampedness of his living conditions, by the misunderstanding of his neighbours, his dependency on medication, on compartmentalised thinking of an ignorant society and the so-called "reality" in general, with its catastrophes and crises. Against this, Peter Kapeller works and writes with the rhetorical over-conciseness of his "Rapidograph". With a microscopic view of "reality", he operates at the real and, at the same time, fictive limits of his autonomy.
2nd prize: Sigrid Reingruber
The second prize goes to Sigrid Reingruber, born in 1980 in Gmunden, Austria. She has worked daily in the studio of the art workshop of Lebenshilfe Gmunden since 1995. Reingruber has given her artistic language several dialects. Depending on how she is feeling, she puts symbols such as the circle, cross or triangle into ever new relationships, or works on drip, spray and so-called "scribble" pictures, which can assume gigantic formats.
The picture integrates and unifies all life areas and chores, it forms a stabilizing background. Such a matrix can also stretch over an infinite sequence of identical pictures, as is the case with Sigrid Reingruber. Subtly gestural pictures that do not tell a story but indulge in the accumulation, densification and crossing of rudimentary signs or graphic formulae. They attempt to conceal something, to cause it to disappear, to make it forgotten, using not figures, not colour and form, but script. But a script that consists not of meaningful characters, but of empty, open ones. This openness, repeatability of the events, the extension over an infinite range of objects, permits the continual return to oneself.
3rd prize: Annemarie Delleg
The third prizewinner is Annemarie Delleg. The twenty-two year old grew up on a farm in South Tyrol. She loves animals, loves her boyfriend Julian just as much as she loves the family whose way of life provided her with a simple, secure and protected childhood in idyllic surroundings. She learnt, or rather taught herself, to draw. She learnt to dream and she dreams of Rome, the kiss, her marriage in a red dress, the stars of Cannes, of mermaids and pregnant girls. She sees herself as a sutler, magician, angel, ..., spreads out in her various roles, tries out identities and poses, tries to expand in her dreams. In her pictures she fights for clear evidence of these visions. At the same time, she tries to capture "it" correctly and always wants to master what she does "correctly". She apparently has models of what is "correct". But she also has the feeling and visual logic of how it really is.The latent conflict of these attempts is not only unmistakable in the pictures, but it is also what makes the work interesting and remarkable. We viewers, who don't question the "skill" of a child-person affected by Down syndrome, but question the reality of her experience, who are not dazzled by the touching representation of an idyll, but (in order to get inside) are captivated by the fractures and cracks in these pictures which refer to us ourselves, which catch our eye. A viewer, who perceives, reads into it, the visible and identifiable, also measures it against the available stock of pictures and cultural representation conventions, instead of reducing it merely to a possible (per se) "irregular" pictorial language of Outsiders.
Patron Emilia Müller, Bavarian State Minister for European Affairs
"The fact that, this year, the euward is being held for the fifth time is a resounding confirmation of the concept behind it. Artists with mental disability have an extraordinary sensitivity to forms, colours and materials. They understand how to express their impressions and feelings in a way that is aesthetically authentic and emotionally moving. As artists they achieve greatness," writes Emilia Müller, the State Minister of Federal and European Affairs in the Bavarian State Chancellery, in her preface to the catalogue.
The Augustinum Foundation
The Augustinum Foundation is the parent organisation of the Augustinum Group, which operates 22 sheltered homes for senior citizens, two sanatoriums for dementia sufferers in Bonn-Oberkassel and Schwindegg (Bavaria), an internal medicine clinic with a heart surgery in Munich, and the Heilpädagogisches Centrum Augustinum (remedial centre), which provides care facilities for children, young people and adults with mental and multiple disabilities. With its special schools, the Augustinum is also a leader in working with the hearing impaired and children with dyslexia, dyscalculia and ADHD. The Augustinum is a non-profit organisation and a member of the Diakonisches Werk - the social organisation of the Evangelical Church in Germany.
