29 October 2008

Attila Csörgo takes the prize

Hungarian artist Attila Csörgo, a creator of "visual machines" is the winner of the €25,000 prize awarded by the Kunststiftung NRW, a German cultural foundation created by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The fourth annual Nam June Paik Award is a juried honor intended "to keep alive the still powerful creative energy of the work of Nam June Paik both in Germany and overseas."

http://www.namjunepaikaward.de/

Attila Csörgö is one of the most prominent contemporary artists practising in Hungary today. His works are immediately entertaining but raise profound questions about how we construct our vision of the world.

Attila works with lights and photography, kinetic structures and changeable geometrical forms. Csörgo presents the reality of systems and phenomena that we normally do not admit. By observing ordinary phenomena under extraordinary conditions, Csörgo creates experiments, often surprising and entertaining, to foreground questions about perception and how we construct our vision of the world. Slanting Water (1995) is Csörgo’s key early work, almost foundational for all his later practice. In this photograph, two glasses filled with water sit on a table. The photograph appears to have been artificially altered, as the water slants in opposite directions in the two glasses. This effect is not an illusion, however; it was created by spinning the table on which the glasses and camera all stood, so that the water was pictured in a centrifuge.

Congratulations, Attila!

Attila Csorgo Official Website