Simon Fujiwara – Installation view of Welcome to the Hotel Munber (2010). Courtesy Baloise Group, Basel.
Simon Fujiwara and Claire Hooper have been announced as winners of this year’s 12th Baloise Art Prize in recognition of outstanding works in the Art Unlimited section of the Art Basel art fair in Switzerland. Each winner will receive a prize of CHF 30,000 from the Basel-based insurance and pensions provider Baloise Group, which will also acquire the artists’ works from the fair and donate them to two prestigious European collections, the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Luftwig in Vienna and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, respectively. Fujiwara is being recognized for his presentation at the stand of Berlin gallery Neue Alte Brücke of the performance-installation Welcome to the Hotel Munber (2010), which restages the life of the artist’s parents in the bar and hotel they ran in the 1970s in Spain during the oppressive Franco regime. Hooper is being recognized for her presentation at the stand of London gallery Hollybush Gardens of the film NYX (2010), which follows a young man through a delirious, night-time descent into the Berlin subway system. This latest international honor for the Mexico City and Berlin-based Fujiwara, who is of mixed Japanese and English parentage, comes on the heels of the artist’s winning the 2010 Cartier Award for London’s Frieze Art Fair, which takes place later this year in October. Previous recipients of the Baloise Art Prize include Haegue Yang (2007), Keren Cytter (2006), Tino Sehgal (2004) and Matthew Ritchie (1999).