The 2017 Luxembourg Art Prize, an international award for the emerging artist of the year, was awarded at the Galerie Hervé Lancelin on Saturday 23 September 2107.
For the 3rd edition, 12 finalist artists came from 11 different countries: Mexico, Lithuania, Netherlands, Russia, United States, Denmark, Luxembourg, Portugal, France, Germany and Italy. Jarik Jongman, a 54-year-old Dutch artist living in Amsterdam, was a unanimous choice of the jury: he won the €25,000 scholarship offered by the gallery and he will be entitled to his solo exhibition next year in Luxembourg.
A graduate of the Academy of Arts in Arnhem in the Netherlands, Jarik Jongman is a former assistant to Anselm Kiefer. His work testifies to his fascination with notions of fugacity, ontology, religion and history. Many of his paintings involve architecture in one form or another: motel rooms, waiting rooms and dilapidated buildings, often devoid of human presence, often causing feelings of nostalgia and contemplation, touch of miraculous or supernatural.
His latest work focuses on what he sees as the main signs of the tragic development of our time: socio-economic pressure, immigration, refugee crisis, international terrorism and climate problems cause anxiety on a global scale. Underlying the feeling of fear and lack of control that these problems cause, our post-truth society emerges, embodied by the current President of the United States, Donald Trump.
The painting presented to the gallery during the Luxembourg Art Prize collective exhibition 2017 is titled "It's Gonna Be Great, it's going to be great, it's going to be fantastic", 180 x 244 cm, 2017, oil, acrylic, tar, plaster and gold leaf on panel. This is a painting of the interior of the Donald Trump’s penthouse located at the top of the Trump Tower in New York. The skyscraper is the archetype of the modernist building and the current American president has made it a false Versailles, illustrating not only its appalling lack of taste but also its lack of historical knowledge and the irony that will accompany its inevitable disappearance. Perhaps his imprudent, arrogant and dangerously philistine attitude will cause our fall to all. This apartment, once a place of life, is now abandoned with obvious traces of decay, suggesting that this fall has already begun.
Luxembourg Art Prize 2017, "Group show of the finalists", is on show until 4 November at the Galerie Hervé Lancelin (7 rue Michel Rodange, L-2430 Luxembourg-ville), every day except Wednesday and Sunday, from 10:00 to 18:00.
