18 October 2018

Ellen-Auerbach Fellowship for Photography 2018 awarded to Annette Frick

In 2018 the Akademie der Künste is awarding the Ellen Auerbach Fellowship for Photography to Annette Frick. This advancement fellowship for international photographers, endowed with 20,000 euros, is financed from the estate of Ellen Auerbach and awarded biannually. The estate is part of the art collection and archives of the Akademie der Künste and the Ellen Auerbach Fellowship is one of several grant programmes administered under the auspices of the JUNGE AKADEMIE.
The award will be presented on 14 November. The Academy members Thomas Florschuetz, Ulrike Ottinger and Michael Ruetz all proposed that Annette Frick should receive the honour. Annette Frick convinced the jury through "the uncompromising way in which her photos focus on nonconformities, as well as the undefinable and unfinished qualities of people and the city – while giving them a radical artistic form."

Annette Frick has consistently devoted her photographic oeuvre in terms of its content and aesthetics to that which is marginal and experimental. Since the nineties, she has portrayed people from Berlin subculture in analogue black and white pictures and slide series, and photographed Berlin's architecture in its upheaval. She engages with the leading lights of the Queer Community and its international network, whose political and artistic attitudes and campaigns are reflected in her long-term project Masken der Identität. She approaches, however, the urban masquerades of the German capital with a critical air, and traces the marks of history as well as the attempts to wipe them away.

Annette Frick was born in 1957 in Bonn. She studied the fine arts from 1978 to 1988 with Arno Jansen, Daniel Spoerri and Robert van Ackern in Cologne, where she was tutored by Arno Jensen in 1988 as his master's student in artistic photography. She worked at the same time as a photographer for several scientific institutes, published texts on art and photography and founded the Hafensalon in her Cologne atelier together with Achim Riechers and Doris Frohnapfel. Frick moved to Berlin in 1996. The Emprise Art Award Düsseldorf was awarded to her in 2006, and further honours included the research award from the DEFA German film foundation for her film about Herbert Tobias, featured in 2011 as part of the Panorama programme of the Berlinale, as well as the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris grant for 2016/17. There have been solo exhibitions of her work in recent years in Frankfurt, Cologne, Berlin, Bremen and Leipzig.

Recent Auerbach Fellowship recipients include Stephanie Kiwitt (2016), Julian Röder (2014), Natalie Czech (2012) and Anastasia Khoroshilova (2010).

Award Presentation
Wednesday, 14 November 2018, 7 pm, free admission
With Hubertus von Amelunxen, Helke Misselwitz, Maren Lübbke-Tidow and the prize winner Annette Frick
Following the ceremony: Book presentation Máj/My by Stephanie Kiwitt, Ellen-Auerbach Fellowship recipient of 2016
Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin