Villa Romana fellows for 2009 nominated:
four young
artists received stipends from the artists' residence in Florence
sponsored by the Deutsche Bank Foundation
Olivier
Foulon, Kalin
Lindena, Benjamin Yavuzsoy, and Eske
Schlüters have been voted the 2009 Villa Romana fellows. At a
meeting on July 18 and 19 in Florence, this year's jury – consisting of Susanne
Titz, director of Museum
Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, and the Berlin-based artist Eran
Schaerf – selected these four artists from 11 proposed applications.
The Villa
Romana Prize is connected with a ten-month work stay (February to
November) at the artists' house in Florence as well as a monthly stipend.
The Villa Romana Prize is awarded by the Villa Romana Patron's Association
and financed by the Deutsche
Bank Foundation, the Federal Government Commissioner for Cultural and
Media Affairs, and additional private sponsors.
Olivier Foulon,
born in Anderlecht, Belgium, in 1976, studied at the Ecole
de Recherche Graphique in Brussels and subsequently in 2001 and 2002
at the Jan van Eyck Academy in
Maastricht. Today he lives in Berlin. In 2005 he received the highly
acclaimed Young Belgian
Painters Award. Foulon's artistic work is concerned with questions of
representation and the act of drawing, with reference systems for picture
production and their (art-historical) antecedents and repetitions, with
the status of model and copy, fragment and whole, indications and history.
His exhibitions are precise "mise en scènes" with complex iconographic and
spatiotemporal references.
Kalin Lindena, born in 1977 in Hanover,
Germany, studied with Walter
Dahn at the HBK
Braunschweig and today lives in Berlin. In 2005 she was awarded the
art prize "junger
westen" and in 2008 the Art
Cologne Young
Artist Prize. In her stage-like installations, the artist operates
with different media (drawing, painting, sculpture, film) and materials
and cites pop and everyday cultural signets as well as art-historical
gestures. The linchpin of her artistic production remains the ambivalence
of quotation and authenticity, expression and the hermetically fragmented.
She is represented with several works in the Deutsche
Bank Collection.
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Eske Schlüters, born in 1970, studied visual communication
at the HFBK
Hamburg. She processes texts and pictures by appropriating visual and
acoustic excerpts from existing film material and disassembling,
reassembling, or reconstructing attitudes. Her filmic narratives are
structured by omitted connections and subsequent omissions; she works with
media as a strategy of circumvention. In 2006 the Museum
of Contemporary Art in Siegen, Germany, devoted a solo exhibition to
Eske Schlüters entitled Sehen
als Denken sehen (Seeing as Seeing Thought).
Benjamin
Yavuzsoy, born in 1980, completed his studies at the HFBK Hamburg in 2007
under Professor Wiebke
Siem and continues to live in Hamburg. In addition to producing text
miniatures, Yavuzsoy works with the format of "video letters" and short
video films in which he is often on camera himself. These works document
performative actions which cast doubt on the codex of intimate and public
spaces, the construction of something that is one’s own versus not one's
own, or they mark the impossible by means of "generous gestures."
Villa
Romana is supported by Deutsche Bank as the main sponsor and is an
internationally oriented artists' residence in Florence. In addition to
studio and living spaces, it contains exhibition rooms, lodging rooms for
artists, curators, and guests, as well as a 15,000 square meter garden in
which public projects are mounted. The Villa Romana was acquired in 1905
by the painter Max
Klinger with the support of a circle of his friends to provide artists
with a spacious workspace. The patron of the Villa Romana and founder of
the Villa Romana Fellowship is the registered association Villa Romana
e.V. In 2006 and 2007 Villa Romana was amply renovated. Situated in the
city of Florence with its overabundance of art-historical treasures, the
Villa Romana serves as a forum for contemporary art which with exhibitions
and different kinds of events initiates dialogue with the general public
in the area and cooperative ventures with interesting partners.
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