MILAN.- Mutina for Art announced that the This Is Not a Prize 2020 award has been assigned to artist Silke Otto-Knapp (Osnabrueck, 1970).

This Is Not a Prize is not just an annual award but also Mutina’s commitment to support a future project of the selected artist: from an exhibition to a collaboration with an international institution, a publication or the production of a new artwork.

Silke Otto-Knapp has been selected by the Mutina team, by its CEO Massimo Orsini and by the curator of Mutina for Art Sarah Cosulich, following a consideration on the importance and visibility that painting has recently reacquired. This year This Is Not a Prize wishes to recognize an international protagonist like Otto-Kapp, who with painting has brought forward in time an excellent and coherent path of great historical-artistic relevance. Despite belonging to the mid-generation, Silke Otto Knapp can already be defined an “artists’ artist” for her reference role both on the level of practice and expression as well as of language and conceptual research.

Silke Otto-Knapp’s paintings represent harmonious pictorial choreographies where figures are interpreters of a sophisticated dialogue with the space of the canvas. Rigorously black and white, obtained through the use of watercolor in a complex process of absorption and stratification, the forms dance on a stage of infinite borders, a type of theatricality in which subject and background alternate as protagonists. Positive and negative, figuration and abstraction, presence and absence acquire concreteness even in their interaction with the ineffability of time and the silence of narration. What emerges is the form’s and silhouette’s rhythmic performance as well as the atmosphere prompted by these fleeting emotive landscapes.

THE OTHER PROTAGONISTS OF THIS IS NOT A PRIZE
In 2019 This Is Not a Prize was assigned to artist Shimabuku, who will collaborate with Mutina in the realization of a new project.

In 2018 This Is Not a Prize was assigned to artist Liz Larner, whose exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich (postponed to 2021) will be sustained by Mutina.

In 2017 This Is Not a Prize was assigned to artist Jochen Lempert, who held a solo show in the MUT exhibition space in 2018.

In 2016 This Is Not a Prize was assigned to artist Giorgio Andreotta Calò and the recognition took form in Mutina’s support of his project for the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.

This Is Not a Prize is an initiative that is part of the wider project Mutina for Art, which also includes MUT - the exhibition space at the company headquarters in Fiorano - and Dialogue - a program of international collaborations with artists, galleries and institutions.

Silke Otto-Knapp is one of the great international protagonists of painting. Born in Germany where she has studied, Otto-Knapp obtained a Masters at the Chelsea College in London to then move to Los Angeles, city in which she lives and works also as professor of painting at UCLA. She has exhibited in solo shows at the Renaissance Society in Chicago (2020) and in the past also at Kunsthalle Wien, Camden Arts Center in London, at Kunstverein Munich and at Tate Britain in London. She has participated to group exhibitions at Barbican Gallery in London (2020), at Tate Modern in London, Liverpool Biennial in 2018, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the ICA in Boston and the 9th International Istanbul Biennial in 2005.