Loth Sculpture Area Prize – Sponsored by the L-Bank
The Loth Sculpture Area Prize – Sponsored by the L-Bank was awarded for the first time at art KARLSRUHE in 2018. Its winner was the most outstanding presentation among the twenty Sculpture Areas.
A jury of experts confers the award, which is endowed with 20,000 euros in prize money. The Sculpture Areas, which can be seen each year in the four halls at the fair, number among the unmistakable special features of this art fair in south-western Germany. The prize honours not only the sculptor, but also the gallery owner who shoulders the great efforts necessary to provide a staging at the fair for artworks that are often in large formats and not seldom extremely heavy.
Laureate 2024: Galerie Art Affair and artist Andreas Blank
The prize is awarded equally to the gallery and the artist. The winners of the sixth Loth Sculpture Area Prize are the gallery Art Affair (Regensburg) and artist Andreas Blank.
The prize was awarded by a jury of experts who justified their judgement as follows: "Here is a sculptor at work who places us at the heart of his artistic conception of our real world and its social conditions. Where does the irony lead the viewer, the consumer of these tableaux of thought, into a thought-provoking learning process?"
Blank takes his inspiration from everyday objects: heavy leather boots, shirts neatly folded into large briefcases, and even detergent bottles. Unexpectedly, however, they are as cumbersome and impractical as they are heavy, because they are not made of leather, fabric or plastic, but of marble, alabaster and porphyry. In this way, Andreas Blank is perfectly in tune with the art of trompe l'oeil, which was mastered in the Baroque period, but which today's artists are happy to take up again. In the jury's motivation, we read: "Blank's objects are both 'precious stones' and stumbling blocks. Thanks to the artist's intellectual and practical intervention, the tension between nature/stone and culture/object has given rise to objects that he combines with sculptures to form a convincing installation".
Andreas Blank, born in 1976 in Ansbach, studied at the Karlsruher Kunstakademie and the HBK Hamburg, as well as at the Royal College of Art in London. He has been exhibiting internationally since 2012 and has received numerous awards. He was awarded a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes in 2005 and 2008, and was last honoured by the Kunstfonds Bonn foundation in 2022.
The eponym Wilhelm Loth
The Loth Sculpture Area Prize is named after the artist Wilhelm Loth (1920-1993). Loth accepted an invitation in 1958 to teach a sculpture class at the art academy in Karlsruhe, where he served as a professor from 1960 until his retirement in 1986. Sculptures were always the focus of Wilhelm Loth’s artistic creativity. He utilized bronze, nickel silver and aluminium as materials. The depiction of the female body is the central artistic aspect about which his oeuvre revolved.
The Expert Jury 2024
- Alexander Heil , Nachlassverwaltung Wilhelm Loth, Karlsruhe
- Dr. Sebastian Baden, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
- Madeleine Dietz, Sculptor
- Dr. Pia Dornacher, Leitung Museum Lothar Fischer, Neumarkt
Previous prize winners
- 2023 Klaus Münch, Galerie Albert Baumgarten, Freiburg
- 2022 Stefan Rohrer, Galerie Scheffel, Bad Homburg
- 2020 Gary Schlingheider, galerie burster, Berlin/Karlsruhe
- 2019 Jörg Bach, Galerie Wohlhüter, Leibertingen-Thalheim
- 2018 Joana Vasconcelos, Galerie Scheffel, Bad Homburg