Horst Janssen Graphic Art Prize of the Claus Hüppe Foundation
For the first time, the Hamburg Kunsthalle is the venue for the renowned Horst Janssen Graphic Art Prize of the Claus Hüppe Foundation. At the jury meeting on 3 May 2021, Serena Ferrario was unanimously chosen as the winner of the 7th Horst Janssen Graphic Art Prize.
Since 2003, every three years, the Claus Hüppe Foundation has been awarding this highly endowed prize of 20,000 € to artists working in the field of drawing, printmaking, computer graphics or photography.
After the prize had been successfully awarded by the Horst Janssen Museum in Oldenburg for many years, the foundation wanted to »let the prize go on a journey«, initially bringing it to Hamburg, where Horst Janssen lived and worked. The Hamburger Kunsthalle not only has the most extensive collection of works by the artist, but, based on numerous exhibitions in recent years, has also become a central venue for contemporary graphic art. The aim is to discover and promote young artists and new positions in the field of graphic art in exchange with universities and academies. Thanks to the outstanding commitment of the Claus Hüppe Foundation, this idea is being generously promoted with the award of the Horst Janssen Graphic Art Prize. In a two-stage selection process, first professors are asked to propose young artists. Five high-ranking representatives from the art and culture sector then nominate the prize winner from the nominated artists.
Eight artists were nominated for this year’s prize by eight distinguished professors from various art academies.
The nominated artists: Serena Ferrario, René Haustein, Tenki Hiramatsu, Katrín Agnes Klar, Jennifer König, Sarah Lehnerer, Christian Schiebe and Jan Zöller.
The mentors: Prof Ulla von Brandenburg (State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe), Prof Daniele Buetti (University of Fine Arts Münster), Prof Marcel van Eeden (State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe), Prof Kyung-hwa Choi-Ahoi (Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin), Nadine Fecht (formerly Braunschweig University of Art), Prof Katharina Hinsberg (Campus Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar), Prof Peter Kogler (Academy of Fine Arts Munich), Prof Christoph Ruckhäberle (Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig / HGB).
The jurors: Dr Jenny Graser (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett), Dr Matthias Mühling (Lenbachhaus Munich), Dr Petra Roettig and Dr Andreas Stolzenburg (Hamburger Kunsthalle), Rik Reinking (WAI Woods Art Institute, Wentorf near Hamburg).
The award will be accompanied by an exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (20 August to 24 October 2021) and a publication by the prize-winner:
Serena Ferrario. 7th winner of the Horst Janssen Graphic Art Prize
Biography:
Serena Alma Ferrario was born in Crema near Milan in 1986. She lives and works in Germany, Italy and Romania. From 2010 to 2017, she studied at the Braunschweig University of Art with Wolfgang Ellenrieder, Isa Melsheimer and Nadine Fecht, among others. In 2016 she received her diploma with distinction and was appointed master student in 2017. Ferrario was a scholarship holder of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes and was awarded the Master Student Scholarship of the Stiftung Braunschweigischer Kulturbesitz and the Max Ernst Scholarship of the city of Brühl in 2017. In 2018, Serena Ferrario received the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship.
About the work:
Serena Ferrario’s multimedia installations depart from graphic exploration. They result from an amalgamation of the social and personal realms: attentive observations along with memories and identity in relation to her family’s own migration history play an essential role in her artistic work. She connects these experiences of internal and external worlds with each other and thus allows new relationships to develop.
Her drawn and printed figures and elements in black, white and shades of grey depart from the surface and occupy the space – repeating themselves to emerge in novel constellations. For these elaborate installations, she also draws on photographs and videos. On her travels, she tends to focus on the culturally familiar. Her own and found material, newspaper clippings and everyday objects are integrated and interwoven into the narrative-metaphorical scenarios. The artist combines the different levels into ever new images that develop processually from her own »fundus«. Drawings merge smoothly into films, become a silhouette-like backdrop for expansive stagings, just as found footage material is interwoven into fascinating biographical collages and narratives.
The jury’s statement:
In her figurative art, the prize winner Serena Ferrario combines various forms of graphic design such as drawings, prints, collages, silhouettes and photographs with complementary and in-depth film material in a highly complex manner, to create expansive installations in which she addresses current social issues.
It was not only this multifaceted approach to graphic media that spoke in favour of awarding the Horst Janssen Graphic Art Prize to the artist Serena Ferrario, but also her sensitive powers of observation, enabling her to discover profound and sometimes supra-temporal structures in the seemingly superficial. As an artist of a global age, Ferrario, in her »quest for the known in the unknown«, succeeds in developing her own contemporary pictorial language, causing the individual media to interlink perceptibly and mutually fertilize each other.
