The British filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen is that this yr’s winner of the Erasmus Prize, given yearly by the Praemium Erasmianum Basis, a Dutch cultural establishment. The award comes with a 150,000 euro (about $172,000) money prize plus “adornments”—on this case, a folded paper booklet printed with textual content within the sixteenth century Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus’s script.
As an artist, McQueen is greatest identified for movies like Occupied Metropolis (2023), a four-and-a-half-hour-long documentary about Amsterdam in the course of the Holocaust; Ashes (2015), which was minimize from footage McQueen shot of a person on a fishing boat in Grenada in 2002; and Static (2009), a view of the Statue of Liberty shot from a circling helicopter. He additionally directed the feature-length movie 12 Years A Slave (2013), which gained the Academy Award for Greatest Image. Extra just lately, McQueen has turned from shifting picture to sound and light-weight works, as in his 2024 set up Bass at Dia:Beacon in New York.
The Erasmus Prize is just not particularly meant for an artist. As an alternative, it’s given to “an individual or establishment that has made an distinctive contribution to the humanities, the social sciences or the humanities, in Europe and past,” in line with press supplies.
Earlier winners have included the South African author, comic, and tv host Trevor Noah (2023); the American author and social activist Barbara Ehrenreich (2018); and the Italian architect Renzo Piano (1995). It was first awarded in 1958 to the Austrian individuals. Different non-individual winners embrace Wikipedia (2015), the Worldwide Fee of Jurists (1989), and Amnesty Worldwide (1976).
Every year, the Erasmus Prize has a unique theme, some extra easy than others. For McQueen, it was “Ecce Homo, Behold the Human Being.” When the English artist Grayson Perry gained in 2021, it was “The ability of the picture within the digital period.” Different visible artists gained for themes like “Photograph and Doc” (Bernd and Hilla Becher, 2002), “Sculpture” (Henry Moore, 1968), and “Portray” (Marc Chagall and Sigmar Polke, in 1960 and 1994, respectively).
“In a world marked by polarization and inequality,” the Praemium Erasmianum Basis wrote, “McQueen’s work asks us to look rigorously and with out prejudice—ecce homo—and to acknowledge ourselves in others.
