Rebecca Horn Awarded the Académie d'Architecture de Paris Prize in Fine Art

Sean Kelly is thrilled to congratulate Rebecca Horn on her being awarded the prestigious Grande Médaille des Arts Plastiques 2011 from the Académie d’Architecture de Paris. This historic cultural institution, founded in 1840 to recognize and distinguish architectural quality in all art forms, held its award ceremony today, Thursday, June 16 at which they honored Rebecca Horn for her achievements in fine art. Past laureates for achievement in fine art include Sheila Hicks, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and James Turrell.

Rebecca Horn (born in Germany, 1944) is without question one of the seminal artists of our time. Her work has ranged over an extensive variety of media, including sculpture, drawing, photography, installation, film and performance, exploring themes of corporeality, perception and philosophy. The active exploration of wide ranging interests - such as science and alchemy, the rational and the intuitive, and the mechanical and the sensual - has occurred repeatedly in her work over the last four decades, resulting in one of the most distinguished and singular oeuvres in recent memory. Horn’s work has been exhibited extensively internationally. She was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; she has participated in the Venice Biennale a number of times and she is one of very few artists who were selected to participate in four iterations of Documenta. Horn has been the recipient of several distinguished awards, including the Documenta Prize (1986), the Carnegie Prize (1988), the Kaiserring from the city of Goslar (1992), the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Award (2004), the Alexej von Jawlensky-Preis der Landeshauptstadt Wiesbaden (2007), and the prestigious Praemium Imperiale Prize for Sculpture (2010).