Study Award 2024/25 of the HGB Circle of Friends and Sparkasse Leipzig
Congratulations to the winners of the HGB Study Award 2024/25:
Hyelim Jeon (Media Art)
Ellen Kolbe (Painting / Printmaking)
Zoe Popp (Photography)
Merlin Rainer (Painting / Printmaking)
Romina Vetter (Book design / Graphic design)
This year, the jury selected five works from 62 submissions. To compensate for the imbalance in the number of applicants - 34 out of 62 applications came from Painting / Printmaking - two works from this subject area were awarded prizes, and one from each of the other three courses. The winners will each receive prize money of €2,000.
This is the 18th time that the Friends of the HGB and Sparkasse Leipzig have announced the HGB Study Award. Applications were open to HGB students of all disciplines who have not yet registered for their diploma and are not Meister-students.
All award-winning works will be shown in the HGB Gallery from February 13, 2025 in parallel with the HGB Rundgang.
Her submission “no stress (untitled 1-15)” is a 14-part series of small-format paintings depicting a figure whose nose is getting longer and longer. In her accompanying text, Ellen Kolbe describes her everyday life as an artist in 14 verses and summarizes it in the last three lines with the statement “no stress - and my little nose grows and grows and grows”.
The jury describes the works as “light, humorous and at the same time ironic” paintings. “Her series shows how painting can be both narrative and aesthetically independent, and opens our eyes to the complex connections between artistic creation, self-image and public perception.”
Her submitted photographic and videographic works “summersun” and “Line2” are part of the work complex “1/3 2/3” and are currently being shown at the Goethe Institute in Seoul. Both works show the artist in Seoul, feeling strange and insecure. “Line2” consists of image-pairings showing the walls of subway stations and views through train windows. The video work “summersun” functions as a loop and shows the part of a room in which a bed stands and the window can be seen. The perspective never changes, only the sunlight moves.
The jury described Zoe Popp's submission as an invitation “to view urban space as a mirror of the human soul - subtle, touching and of extraordinary visual power”.
The submitted work “UPLOAD DDR” was created in the seminar “AUFBRUCH und ERINNERUNG” by Dieter Daniels and was shown during Leipzig's Festival of Lights 2024 on Augustusplatz.
The core theme of the eight-minute hand-drawn documentary is HardTekk: an electronic music genre that is mainly played in East Germany. This music scene raises questions about the so called “Ostalgie” (Eastgerman Nostalgia) of a generation that was born after the Fall of the Wall but still feels connected to the GDR. The film aims to describe this phenomenon without judging it. The images are accompanied by music and sound created in collaboration with Junyu Gou and Vegasmom, as well as an interview with the protagonist Jill.
The jury statement says: “With his work, Merlin Rainer opens up new perspectives on the culture of remembrance and social narratives - powerful, precise and haunting at the same time."
In her competition entry “Verknappte Konversationen”, Vetter explores the phenomenon of abbreviations using signs, images and typography. The work consists of two booklets. The first deals with abbreviations that are part of everyday language and have become established, especially in digital communication. These abbreviations, which Romina Vetter copied from her personal chat histories, are paired with descriptive texts that can be assigned to topics such as pop culture or reduction. The second booklet shows color-reduced photographs, also from the artist's personal archive, which take up the theme of abbreviations or shortened physical paths and relate them to common acronyms such as XXL, LKW (short for the German term for truck) or ASAP.
“Romina Vetter's works not only show a deep understanding of the mechanisms of contemporary communication, but also inspire with their creative precision and poetic lightness,” the jury said.