Hugo Boss Prize Exhibition Featuring New Work by Anicka Yi to Open at Guggenheim

Hugo Boss Prize winner Anicka Yi opens a solo show of her conceptual art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City on April 21, 2017. The exhibition presents a layered examination of the intersecting biological, social, political and technological systems that define our lives, according to the museum. Yi is the 11th artist to receive the biennial prize, which was established in 1996 to recognize significant achievement in contemporary art and which recently marked its 20th anniversary.

The new work in "The Hugo Boss Prize 2016: Anicka Yi" represents a continuation of Yi’s ongoing study of microorganic forms, data collection, and sensory perception. The exhibition will be on view from April 21 to July 5, 2017 on Tower Level 5 in the New York City art museum. It was organized by Katherine Brinson, Curator, Contemporary Art, and Susan Thompson, Assistant Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Through concepts and techniques drawn from scientific research, Anicka Yi’s installations create vivid fictional scenarios that ask incisive questions about human psychology and the workings of society. Challenging the dominance of vision in encountering an artwork, she expands the perceptual experience of the “viewer” into a broader sensory immersion.

Installation view of "7,070,430K of Digital Spit" by Anicka Yi. Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, 2015 Courtesy 47 Canal, New York, and Kunsthalle Basel, Basel Photo: Philipp Hänger.

Anicka Yi (b. Korea 1971) currently lives and works in New York. Her art has been exhibited at White Columns and Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York, The Green Gallery (Milawaukee), Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery (Munich), Karma International (Zurich) and others.

Yi has a longstanding interest in smell and its potent link to memory and subjectivity, at times activating her installations with scents designed to evoke specific emotional states or cultural identities. Her work studies the ramifications of both the digital and corporeal realms, with a focus on how biology, particularly in relation to gender or race, is frequently politicized.

In October 2016, Yi was selected as the winner of the 2016 Hugo Boss Prize from a short list of six finalists that included Tania Bruguera, Mark Leckey, Ralph Lemon, Laura Owens and Wael Shawky. The 2016 jury consisted of Katherine Brinson; Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston; Elena Filipovic, Director and Chief Curator, Kunsthalle Basel; Michelle Kuo, Editor in Chief, Artforum International; and Pablo León de la Barra, Guggenheim UBS Map Curator, Latin America, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

“In selecting Anicka Yi as the winner from an exceptionally strong group of nominated artists, we wish to highlight the singularity of her vision and the generative new possibilities for artistic production offered by her practice," explained the jury in a statement accompanying the museum announcement. "We are particularly compelled by the way Yi’s sculptures and installations make public and strange, and thus newly addressable, our deeply subjective corporeal realities. We also admire the unique embrace of discomfort in her experiments with technology, science, and the plant and animal worlds, all of which push at the limits of perceptual experience in the ‘visual’ arts.”

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BASIC FACTS: "The Hugo Boss Prize 2016: Anicka Yi" will be exhibited April 21 to July 5, 2017 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY. The exhibition is located on Tower Level 5. www.guggenheim.org.

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