Based on the recommendation of the jury of seven experts, the Hamburg Senate has decided to award this year’s Edwin Scharff Prize to visual artist Gunter Reski. Born in 1963 in Bochum, from 1986 to 1992 Gunter Reski studied Art under Gottfried Graubner at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (University of Fine Arts of Hamburg). In 1996 he received a fellowship from the Hamburg Department of Culture supporting his work, and taught at universities in Hamburg and Oslo. He currently teaches in Berlin.
As Hamburg’s Senator of Culture Prof. Barbara Kisseler comments, “Gunter Reski has helped shape Hamburg’s cultural life for many years. In his choice of expressive channels and his diverse work, the artist goes beyond pure painting. His creative output ranges from developing unimagined exhibition formats, such as the spatial realization of a novel, to his latest efforts to radically rethink how painting is communicated."
Image and text play an equally important role in Gunter Reski’s paintings. The artist combines quotations from various areas of everyday life (such as advertising or computer animation) with his own pictorial inventions. As eye-catching as Reski’s pictures seem at first glance, their main characteristic is how inventively and variedly they repeatedly take painting as their actual theme.
The Edwin Scharff Prize counts among the traditional distinguished awards bestowed by the Hamburg Senate and has been an important means of supporting major visual artists for more than 55 years. The award is worth 7,500 euros. Previous prize-winners include Ulrich Rückriem, Franz Erhard Walther, Anna and Bernhard Blume, and Daniel Richter.