Marta Prize
Since 2014, the foundation of the Herford entrepreneur and art collector Heiner Wemhöner has been funding the Marta Prize, endowed with 25,000 euros, every two years. In addition to the prize money, the award also enables the prize winners to produce a new work for the Marta collection. The award is presented during the opening of a solo exhibition in a festive setting and also includes an accompanying catalog production.
The selection of the prize winners is made by an independent expert jury.
Marta Prize 2022: Lena Henke
In her diverse sculptural works, which are characterized by a clear color and formal language, the German sculptor Lena Henke pursues the conditions and possibilities of sculpture and reinvents seemingly familiar things. Her installations intervene in the given architecture on site, reacting to its spatial and social structures.
She presented her work for the Marta Collection as part of a solo exhibition in the Lippold Gallery. Lena Henke’s solo exhibition Good Year (2023-09-02-2024-01-07) referred, among other things, to her own upbringing in rural Westphalia and the associated values and status symbols. The work Marta L.Henke (2023), created for the Marta Collection, captures this memory sensually, in a fragrance that combines hot country air, kitchen fumes, tires and asphalt.
Lena Henke was born in Warburg in 1982 and studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, before graduating in 2010 with Prof. Michael Krebber in Frankfurt. She lives and works in Berlin and New York.
Marta Prize 2020: Brigitte Waldach
The former master student of Georg Baselitz, Brigitte Waldach, explores intellectual and literary connections in her text clouds, spatial drawings and sound installations. Again and again, she deals intensively with German history, from the persecution of Jews during the Nazi era to the myth of the Red Army Faction (RAF) of the 70s, but also recently with the “Goldberg Variations” by J. S. Bach.
Her work “Schweigen I” (2020) was created as part of the Marta Prize 2020, which was presented in the Marta show “Brigitte Waldach: Shimmer and Shine” with a selection of large-format drawings and a multi-faceted spatial installation and passed into the Marta Collection after the end of the exhibition.
Brigitte Waldach was born in Berlin in 1966. After studying art education, art history and German studies, she completed her studies in Fine Arts in 2000 at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin as a master student of Georg Baselitz. She lives and works in Berlin.
Marta Prize 2018: Peter Wächtler
Peter Wächtler explores the relationship between art and language with his sculptures, films, drawings and installations and is interested in the interactions between image and word.
His mobile for the Marta Collection, Untitled (Füller), 2019, consists of oversized fountain pens of various model designs cast in aluminum. The everyday objects allude to collective memories and biographies. The work appears as a kinetic sculpture, but actually begins with the artist’s acceptance speech at the award ceremony in 2018. In doing so, he jumps from A to B, seemingly loses the thread and then confidently picks it up again. The moving fountain pens become a symbol of his language, which moves just as freely and spontaneously in space.
Peter Wächtler, born in Hanover in 1979, studied at the Bauhaus University in Weimar and at the Kent Institute of Art & Design in Canterbury. He lives and works in Berlin and Brussels.
Marta Prize 2016: Simon Wachsmuth
Simon Wachsmuth deals with history, its re-construction and representation in his works in a variety of ways.
For his Marta work Pax Optima Rerum (2017), he dealt with the Thirty Years’ War, which ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia. In doing so, he places a special focus on its political effects, which continue to this day, for example with regard to the distribution of power in and among states.
This confrontation has finally found its form in the shape of a picture wagon, a wooden cart reminiscent of Mother Courage, on and around which Wachsmuth gathers materials on the subject. With the presentation in 2017, however, he did not declare the work to be finished: it can be supplemented and expanded by him – especially in the context of further exhibitions – with new material.
Simon Wachsmuth was born in Hamburg in 1964 and studied painting and visual media studies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He lives and works in Berlin.
Marta Prize 2014: Heike Mutter / Ulrich Genth
Heike Mutter and Ulrich Genth conceive site- and context-related works that are based on intensive research. They refer to objects of everyday culture, but give them a twist in order to illuminate their institutional structure.
For the Marta, Mutter/Genth created The View in 2015, a complex installation that refers to a traditional industry in the Herford region: the fitted kitchen. The work, which is as filigree as it is expansive, consisting of a modular rod construction with panels, lights, surfaces and objects, deals with design and forms of use as speaking symbols and status signals. This elegant material collage is combined with elements from advertising, consumer culture and materials research.
Heike Mutter was born in Munich in 1969 and studied media art in Karlsruhe and Cologne. Ulrich Genth, born in Tübingen in 1971, studied object art at the Münster Art Academy. They have been an artist duo since 2013 and live and work together in Hamburg.