Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles is the winner of the Roswitha Haftmann Prize, the European art award with the biggest cash purse of any on the continent. Through it, he will receive 150,000 Swiss francs, or just over $174,000.
The prize takes its name from Roswitha Haftmann, a Swiss dealer whose Zurich gallery was in operation until she died in 1998. The award, which is now facilitated by her foundation, is given out regularly to living artists.
Its winners tend to be artists who are already well-known. Gülsün Karamustafa, the most recent winner, in 2021, was just announced to do the Turkish Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale; the 2019 winner, Valie Export, is regarded as one of the most important feminist artists of all time. Other past winners include Cindy Sherman, Pierre Huyghe, and Maria Lassnig.
Meireles, who was born in 1948 in Rio de Janeiro and is still based there, is the first Latin American artist ever to win the prize in its 22-year history.
He is best known for projects such as “Insertions into Ideological Circuits,” a series of sculptural works from the 1970s in which Meireles created objects that recalled Coca-Cola bottles, banknotes, and more, the only difference being that his versions contained anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist messaging. These works and many others by him are explicitly critical of Brazil and its politicians.
In the intervening decades, Meireles has also created large-scale sculptural installations, among them Babel (2001), a tower of television sets that play various channels’ programming in different languages.
Yilmaz Dziewior, director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and a board member of the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation, said in a statement, “The jury was impressed by the artist’s exceptional talent for involving his audience both intellectually and emotionally with politically charged and aesthetically fascinating works.”
Elsewhere in Switzerland, artist Olaf Holzapfel was announced this week as the winner of the Zurich Art Prize. That award comes with 100,000 Swiss francs ($116,000), with four-fifths of it acting as a budget for an exhibition at the Museum Haus Konstructiv, which awards the prize with Zurich Insurance Company Ltd.