Winners of the Nasher Prize embody the tenets of the award: to recognize a living artist whose body of work has had an extraordinary impact on our understanding of sculpture. Their work represents the pinnacle of achievement in the medium, extending its expressive possibilities and often expanding upon the notion of what sculpture is or can be.
With a career spanning four decades, Isa Genzken has continually reinvented the language of sculpture by creating objects inspired by popular culture and historical events that explore the complexities of contemporary realism.
The 2017 Nasher Prize Laureate Pierre Huyghe has profoundly expanded the parameters of sculpture through artworks encompassing a variety of materials and disciplines, bringing music, cinema, and dance into contact with biology and philosophy and incorporating time-based elements as diverse as fog, ice, parades, rituals, automata, computer programs, games, dogs, bees, and microorganisms. Huyghe has consistently sought new ways to bring them together into a practice exceeding the sum of its multifarious parts.