DISTINGUISHED PRIZE

To highlight and honour a senior art critic from the country hosting the annual AICA Congress and introduce that critic to a wider network, and through the publishing programme of aica publications, when appropriate.

DISTINGUISHED PRIZE 2024 HAS BEEN AWARDED TO Professor Ileana Pintilie

DISTINGUISHED PRIZE 2023 HAS BEEN AWARDED TO Aneta Szyłak.

Aneta Szyłak (1959-2023), recipient of AICA's Prize for Distinguished Art Critic in 2023, sadly passed away just a couple of weeks before the award ceremony. She is being honored for lifetime achievement, and the scope of her practice can hardly be summarized in a few sentences.

She was a critic and curator active both in Poland and internationally, as well as a translator of important critical texts (she translated into Polish, among others, "Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space" by Bryan O'Doherty). As a critic and curator, she built close and long-lasting relationships with artists. She accompanied them on their creative path, supported them and engaged in dialogue with them. The fruits of their collaboration were often solo exhibitions (such as two recent groundbreaking shows: Hiwa K's 2019 "Highly Unlikely but not Impossible" or Joanna Rajkowska's 2021 "Rhizopolis", both at the Zachęta National Art Gallery in Warsaw). However, Aneta has passed into the history of art in Poland primarily as a curator of group exhibitions – confronting pertinent issues in contemporary social life in the country and beyond – and as an organizer of cultural life.

The Gdansk Shipyard, the cradle of the Solidarity movement, played a special role in her biography. It was in its premises that Aneta founded and ran multiple organizations such as the Wyspa Institute of Art, Alternativa Foundation and, later, NOMUS The New Museum of Art (a branch of the National Museum in Gdansk). As she emphasized herself, her long-standing interaction with this place – as the heart of the labor movement before 1989, but also a victim of later deindustrialization – taught her attention to social inequalities and antagonisms.

Her deep social sensitivity was reflected in such hallmark exhibitions as “Guardians of the Docks” (Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk, 2005), “BHP” (Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk, 2004) or “Architectures of Gender” (SculptureCenter, New York, 2003).

In recent years, she was working on her doctoral thesis “Curating Context. The Palimpsest on the Quotidian and the Curatorial” as part of the Curatorial/Knowledge programme at Goldsmiths University of London and the University of Copenhagen. It certainly would have complemented the extensive list of her publications, which earned her multiple scholarships and accolades, including the 2004 Jerzy Stajuda Art Criticism Award.

She was an active member of AICA and served on the board of the Polish Section for several years. With her writings and curatorial endeavours, she made a substantial contribution to the development of experimental institutionalism, art-based research and feminist art discourse in Poland and beyond.

She will be missed dearly.

Arkadiusz Półtorak, President of AICA Poland

DISTINGUISHED PRIZE 2022

The 54th AICA Congress was held in Valparaiso, Chile and Buenos Aires, Argentina November 13-19-2022. This year AICA awarded two ‘Distinguished’ art crtics.

 The Chilean winner was Waldemar Sommer, who has spent forty years as an art critic for El Mercurio, and author of Chilean art books including Arte En Viaje, 2018.

The Argentine winner was Ana María Battistozzi, an art critic and curator. Since 1986, she has worked for the Clarin Newspaper, and since 2003 for Ñ Magazine. From 2000-2007 Battistozzi was advisor to the Ministry of Culture of the Buenos Aires city government, were she designed and directed the Estudio Abierto Art Festival in its nine editions.

Congratulations,
Jean Bundy, Awards Chair

DISTINGUISHED PRIZE 2021 HAS BEEN AWARDED TO PROF. DR. GÜNSEL RENDA.

Prof. Dr. Günsel Renda completed her undergraduate and graduate education in art history in Columbia and Washington Universities in the USA. She served as a faculty member and department chair in the Art History Department of the same university until 2004. Günsel Renda, who has been a faculty member at Koç University Archaeology and Art History Department since 2004, served as a ministerial advisor at the Ministry of Culture and a member of the IRCICA board of directors, and lectured on Ottoman painting as a visiting professor at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes à la Sorbonne in Paris. She was invited to give conferences to many countries abroad, took part in international research projects, and received various awards. She has been in the organising committee of many international exhibitions such as Women in Anatolia, The Sultan’s Portrait, Image of the Turks in the 17th Century Europe, Portolan and Sea Maps in XIV-XVIII Centuries, Views of Venice and Istanbul through the Centuries, An Eyewitness to the Tulip Period Jean-Baptiste Vanmour, Istanbul The City of Dreams with Selected Works of Art from the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Collection, etc.

She has many articles written in Turkish and foreign languages on Ottoman painting and Europe-Ottoman relations in art, published congress papers, encyclopaedia articles, and books that she is the editor and author of. Some of her works are: Turkish Painting in the Westernisation Period, The Transformation of Culture. The Atatürk Legacy (ed. Renda, Kortepeter) A History of Turkish Painting (Grabar, Renda, Turani, Özsezgin), The Sultan's Portrait.Tesavir-i Al-i-Osman (Necipoğlu, zur-Capellen, Majer, Çağman, Bağcı, Mahir, İrepoğlu, Renda), An Eyewitness to the Tulip Period Jean-Baptiste Vanmour (St. Nicolas, Bull, Renda, İrepoğlu), Minnet av Constantinople. Den osmansk-turkiska 1700-talssamlingen pa Biby (Achlund, Adahl, Brown, Karlsson, Kaberg, Laine, Renda) Ottoman Civilization (ed. İnalcık, Renda), Ottoman Painting Art (Bagcı, Çağman, Renda, Tanındı).

DISTINGUISHED CONTRIBUTION TO ART CRITICISM in GERMANY 2019

At the suggestion of AICA Germany, the long-time art critic and author Walter Grasskamp was honoured with the Prize for a Distinguished Contribution to Art Criticism on the occasion of the International AICA Congress in Cologne and Berlin in October 2019. Since the 1970s, Grasskamp (born in 1950 in the Rhineland) has been following the work of now well-known artists such as Hans Haacke, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter, as well as Markus Raetz, Aldo Walker, Axel Kasseböhmer, and Benn Willikens, who have attracted attention with their idiosyncratic works.

Grasskamp is the author of numerous texts on contemporary art and museum theory. He became known for his expertise in the fields of political theory and the social history of the museum, the exhibition business, and art in public spaces. As ‘oral history’, his conversations with painters, curators, and gallerists have made a significant contribution to the reception history of post-war art in Germany.

The publication Walter Grasskamp. The Angel Vanishes - Profiles in Postmodern Art, has been realised thanks to the kind support of Kulturstiftung des Bundes and in collaboration with les presses du réel, now available on AICA PUBLICATIONS

>> The publication is available online in German on the website of AICA Germany (www.aica.de), with the title Walter Gasskamp. Ein Engel verschwindet.

DISTINGUISHED CONTRIBUTION TO THE VISUAL ARTS IN TAIWAN 2018

Proposed by AICA Taiwan, the Taiwanese professor and curator Huang Hai-ming (b. 1950) received the Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Visual Arts in Taiwan. Huang Hai-ming has since the 1980s greatly contributed to shaping artistic and curatorial practices, especially in the field of art in the public domain including outdoor spaces which are recurrent topics in his critical writing and curatorship. He has served as a curator at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and worked as an independent exhibition manager sought by institutions and art initiatives in Taiwan. On receiving the diploma from AICA International President, Lisbeth Rebollo Gonçalves, Huang Hai-ming expressed his gratitude and spoke of the significance of an international organisation’s recognition of critical curatorship in Taiwan.

PreVIOUS RECIPIENTS

Previous recipients of the AICA Award for Distinguished Contribution to Art Criticism are:

Georges Didi-Huberman (France, 2017)

Adelaida de Juan (Cuba, 2016)

Sarah Wilson (United Kingdom, 2015)

Lee Yil (South Korea, 2014)

Tomáš Štrauss (Slovakia, 2013)

Annemarie Monteuil (Switzerland, 2012)

Ticio Escobar (Paraguay, 2011)