The 2024 Sikkens Prize will be presented to the renowned Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist in a special ceremony on Monday, October 7th, organised by Museum Boijmans van Beuningen and Kunsthal Rotterdam. This prestigious prize, worth €75,000, will crown Rist’s pioneering work with colour and video. According to the jury, her work profoundly influences young generations; she is definitively one of those artists who have marked the history of art.
Given once every two years, the Sikkens Prize recognises persons and organisations that have made outstanding innovations in the use of colour in art and design. Inaugurated in 1959, previous recipients of the prize include architects like Gerrit Rietveld and artists like Donald Judd and Bridget Riley. This year, the prize money has been upped to €75,000, with €50,000 intended for personal development and another €25,000 reserved for a specific colour-related project.
Pipilotti Rist’s art is as colourful and dynamic as the artist herself. Pipilotti has been known, ever since her early days, for her surrealistic and dreamlike video installations internationally. The first name of Pipilotti is taken after Pippi Longstocking, which can be elaborated on because she has a playful and imaginative approach to the world. According to the artist herself, “Color is the basic element in my works. From bright colour to subtle broken tones, colour creates mood and atmosphere.”
Since the mid-1980s, Rist’s art has been exhibited globally; recent solo shows in Doha, New York, Hong Kong, Los Angeles and Zurich have drawn record crowds. In the Netherlands, she exhibited in 2009 a retrospective “Elixir” at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen an. In021, she created the popular installation “Wasting Life on You” for the Depot entrance of the same museum. Her work is also in the possession of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Centraal Museum Utrecht.
More than that, the Sikkens Prize is not given as money but as an award for colour’s transformative power in our lives. This year, Rist plans to use her prize money to underwrite the “Safety Curtain” project by the Austrian art organisation museum, which is in progress. This project calls for an artist to transform the usually nondescript red curtain at the Vienna State Opera into something of an artwork—a projection by Anselm Kiefer, David Hockney, and Jeff Koons, among others.
Born in 1962 in Grabs, a small town in the Swiss Rhine Valley, Rist has been one of the key figures in the international art world from the mid-1980s onward. With several innovative video artworks, such as “I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much” from 1986 and “Pickelporno” from 1992, she managed to push the boundaries of the medium. She explored new technological possibilities that became available during her early career. Using large-scale video projections and digital manipulation, she creates completely immersive environments in which viewers become submerged in cascades of colour and sound.
Rist’s works are always personal, starting with the general human theme of vulnerability and human connections. Her installations, such as “Pixel Forest” in 2016, would include the viewer in a kind of world that light and colour would have created, in which there is no longer any boundary between reality and imagination. As Rist herself says, “Beside the energy-intensive exploration of the geographical world, pictures, films, and sounds have been and are the spaces into which we can escape… The projector is the flamethrower, the space is the vortex, and you are the pearl within.”
Rist has had innumerable solo and group exhibitions worldwide and is still an innovator in video art. The following exhibitions are only recent ones she has held: “Electric Idyll”, Doha, 2024; “Prickling Goosebumps & A Humming Horizon”, New York, 2023-2024; “Behind Your Eyelid”, Hong Kong, 2022. This will be followed by a large retrospective planned for Beijing in 2025, further sealing her position as one of the most influential artists of our time.
The Sikkens Foundation was established in 1972 to attract more public interest in the significance of colour in life. Through activities, including the Sikkens Prize and the Mondrian Lecture, the foundation promotes knowledge and appreciation concerning the application of colour in art and design. The board comprises art, culture, and science experts, and AkzoNobel supports them.