Tacita Dean wins Hugo Boss Prize

The English artist Tacita Dean has won the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize. Global Warming Your Cold Heart was, of course, rooting for Tino Sehgal.

From Bloomberg News: Tacita Dean, an English artist best known for her contemplative films, won this year’s Hugo Boss Prize, a $50,000 award from the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the museum said. Dean’s recent motion pictures include this year’s Kodak, which shows an Eastman Kodak Co. factory in Germany producing its final run of 16-millimeter film, said Joan Young, associate curator of contemporary art at the Guggenheim.

“It’s a witness to, and an example of, an increasingly obsolete medium,” Young said. Earlier works included drawings on chalkboards and alabaster and a film portraying a sunset as seen through the windows of a revolving restaurant, Young said.

The Hugo Boss Prize, sponsored by Hugo Boss AG, the Metzingen, Germany-based clothing maker, is among the large single-artist prizes that have sprung up as government arts funding has declined, Young said in a telephone interview today. It is one of the few without restrictions on the artist’s age, gender, race, nationality, or medium, she said. Prior winners of the biennial award included American Matthew Barney, Scot Douglas Gordon, Slovenian Marjetica Potrc, French Pierre Huyghe, and Thai Rirkrit Tiravanija, the Guggenheim said in a statement.