Premio Combat Prize

Nicolas Vionnet’s original medium is acrylic on canvas. His chiefly large-scale works play with space and expanse. Although almost always realistic, his paintings have more in common with abstract images than real landscapes. He paints disruptive grey strips across his clouds and allows coloured surfaces to drip down the canvas in accordance with the laws of gravity. Vionnet is fascinated by such irritations: interventions that approach and create a non-hierarchical dialogue with the environment. This dialogue opens up a field of tension, which allows the viewer an intensive glimpse of both these phenomena.

Vionnet uses the same approach and the same strategy for his installations and objects. Irritation and integration. A fundamental confrontation with the history of a place leads to a subtler and more precise intervention of the object. Take for example his man-made grass island at the Weimarhallen Park (Weimar, GER), which ironically intensified the park’s own artificiality. In ‘Close the Gap’ (Leipzig, GER) he bridged the space between an old-town row of houses with a printed canvas image of the now much frowned upon prefabricated building. A reference to changes in time and aesthetics.

Nicolas Vionnet lives and works in the Zurich area. He graduated from the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Basel. He graduated in 2009 from the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar with a Master of Fine Arts degree after studying on the university’s Public Art and New Artistic Strategies programme. Vionnet has participated in various exhibitions at home and abroad since 1999, including at The Wilson Cheltenham Art Gallery an Museum, LACDA (Los Angeles Center for Digital Art and the III Moscow International Biennale for Young Art.