The 2013 Leopold Bloom Art Award Winner announced

The Award Ceremony of the second Leopold Bloom Art Award took place in Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, on Friday evening, the 6th of September 2013. Prior to the event the Jury of The Leopold Bloom Art Award – Katia Baudin (art historian, Deputy Director and Senior Curator of the Museum Ludwig Cologne), Annie Fletcher (Curator of Exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and tutor at De Appel, Amsterdam), Tihomir Milovac (art historian, Head of the Experimental and Research Department at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb) – visited each shortlisted artist’s studio, in order to get a wider picture of the finalists’ work.

According to their decision, the 2013 Leopold Bloom Art Award went to Csaba Nemes.

In his works Csaba Nemes reflects sensitively on issues that have been recently generating tension in the Hungarian society, such as ethnic discrimination and resulting tragic conflicts, or the increased presence of extreme right politics in public life. In his paintings, storyboards, animated and puppet films, he reinterprets exact, factual details of events well-known from the media. Another recurrent topic is the evocation of the milieu of the communist Hungary, his own childhood. His latest works represent moments from the present, the past, and a possible (anti)utopian future, by means of remembrance and imagination.
The Jury characterized Nemes as "an artist we feel practice is not only technically superb but emotionally intelligent and conceptually rigorous. While already simply an outstanding painter with many fascinating investigative series which he developed over time Nemes does not rest on his laurels - as it were - but rather pushes his practice in new and innovative ways choosing and utilising other media and technique when appropriate to the conceptual force of each project. Further his practice frequently gives voice and visibility to urgent and uncomfortable questions about the socio political situations in which Hungary finds itself today. We think this role and capacity of art to demands that the world should be different from its’ sometimes grimmer reality is an extraordinarily important one.”

The Jury also commended Ildikó Péter and Eszter Szabó, whose practice they found similarly outstanding and worthy for public mention.