With the LEAP prize, Rotondes (while already supporting the work of young artists in the Greater Region with its Triennale) awards contemporary artists with a connection to the Grand Duchy and offers a springboard to greater visibility and a professional career. The prize aims to help artists demonstrating an innovative approach to contemporary creation and to support the development of their careers.
Visual arts & Exhibition / Contemporary art LEAP20
The Luxembourg Encouragement for Artists Prize
This exhibition showcases works by this year’s winner, Hisae Ikenaga, as well as works by the other finalists selected by an international jury, Suzan Noesen, Nina Tomàs and the duo Bruno Baltzer & Leonora Bisagno.
The winner
Hisae Ikenaga
Hisae Ikenaga is a Mexican-Spanish artist who lives and works in Luxembourg. Her art focuses on everyday objects which she modifies to give them different meanings and usages. Her work is full of irony and absurdity, as in her recent series representing an impossible archaeological discovery.
The jury’s opinion
By awarding the LEAP20 prize to Hisae Ikenaga, the jury acknowledges the great consistency of her work, rich in interdisciplinary references and evocative of the diversity of human work between industrial and artisanal production. The jury appreciates the proposed formal synthesis and to the touches of strangeness and irony going against the apparent minimalism.
The finalists
Suzan Noesen
Suzan Noesen is a multidisciplinary Dutch-Luxembourgish artist based in Luxembourg. Noesen explores the role of aesthetics and of art in the context of social classifications. Her work has the feel of experimental anthropological research.
Nina Tomàs
Nina Tomàs is a French-Luxembourgish artist who lives and works in Luxembourg. Her paintings take on many subjects, such as systems (ecological, economic, nervous) and identities (local, global, hybrid). Her work, which is dreamlike and brings together diverse figures, times, and spaces, has a unique and complex poetry.
Baltzer & Bisagno
Baltzer and Bisagno is a duo of artists made up of the French-Luxembourgish Bruno Baltzer and the Italian-German Leonora Bisagno, based in Luxembourg. In a prolific body of work that takes many forms, the duo analyses representation and the contemporary condition of the image. They develop their perspectives in response to specific contexts (a residency abroad, a political event, a topical issue), exploring every component of their subjects: formal, technical, political, and cultural.
LEAP20 is organised by Rotondes and presented by RTL.
