Artist Guadalupe Maravilla has been announced as the recipient of The Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award 2021. The bi-annual award – presented by the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter – gives USD$100,000 USD to an artist ‘whose work will inspire and motivate future generations to active participation and social responsibility.’
Maravilla, born in 1976 in El Salvador, is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. At the age of eight, Maravilla arrived in the US as an undocumented, unaccompanied child, fleeing civil war. The memory of his childhood, alongside his later experience of cancer treatment as an adult, have become an important presence within his artistic practice and artworks.
In addition to the prize, the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award programme also includes an acquisition budget to support the placement of the artist’s work in the Henie Onstad Collection, and a dedicated exhibition for the recipient.
The solo exhibition at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Norway, is scheduled for 14 January – 30 April 2022.
The jury for the award was comprised of María Inés Rodríguez, Michelle Kuo, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Paulina Rider Wilhelmsen, Caroline Ugelstad, and Tone Hansen. ‘Guadalupe Maravilla’s interdisciplinary practice constantly refers to his experiences of exile and illness, migration and healing, identity and displacement,’ the jurors said in a statement.
‘Yet Maravilla’s work is also far more than his life. Building on personal narratives but venturing far afield into pre-Columbian mythologies, collective memory, geopolitical history, and material culture, the artist constructs artworks that act.’
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