Pax Art Awards 2021
The Pax Art Awards will be presented for the fourth time in 2021. With its art prizes, the Art Foundation Pax honours and promotes, in collaboration with HEK, a media-specific practice of Swiss artists whose works use media technologies or reflect on their impact.
The main prize of CHF 30’000 goes to the artist Marc Lee for his advanced and and long-standing work in the field of media art. The artist will receive CHF 15’000 as a prize money and production support for a new work. Another CHF 15’000 will be used to acquire a work for the collection of Art Foundation Pax. Two additional prizes will be awarded to young, up-and-coming media artists. This year, Chloé Delarue and Laurent Güdel will each receive CHF 15’000 including prize money and acquisition.
Marc Lee
The Pax Art Awards jury is pleased to award Marc Lee (*1969) with this year's Pax Art Award for an established voice in the domain of media arts in Switzerland. With a net-based practice he has been a long-standing and important voice within the media art field in Switzerland and he has created a striking body of work. Marc Lee creates impressive and immersive installations that expand through spaces which simultaneously enchant and overwhelm.
Chloé Delarue
Chloé Delarue (*1986) lives and works in Geneva. In her work she produces installations that combine sculpture, video, and sounds under the TAFAA acronym, standing for Toward a Fully Automated Appearance. Her works, which the artist calls «environments», are formed as elements of the redesign of an abstract body. In this process, these elements converge and overlap, and a kind of information spectrum emerges, combining an immaterial and matter-like flux of forms and meaning.
Laurent Güdel
Laurent Güdel has electricity running through his body of work, on multi-track mode. In his constantly shifting tangle of veins and cables, electricity is both a communicational actor with a storied history in transporting sound, and a live-wire twitch on the spine of the present.