The Art+Technology Award 2018 goes to Zoro Feigl

Kinetic artist Zoro Feigl wins the Witteveen+Bos Art+Technology Award 2018. On 1 November he will receive the prize in Deventer from Karin Sluis, director of engineering firm Witteveen+Bos. Zoro Feigl is fascinated by why things work the way they work, why does something move the way it moves. Using used building materials, industrial engines, plastics and steel, he builds machines that appear to exhibit predictable behaviour but still keep surprising. Some of these machines will be shown in the solo exhibition Feigl is organising in the Deventer Bergkerk on the occasion of winning the Art+Technology Award.

Zoro Feigl (1983) studied at the Utrecht School of the Arts, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Ghent. With his wife and two children he lives and works in the Belgian Kempen. Feigl was born into an artistic family, a child of artist Franz Feigl and filmmaker Ine Poppe, although this did not automatically lead to the choice of going into art himself. At an exhibition by Felix Hess - who won the Witteveen+Bos Art+Technology Award in 2003 - he saw what art could be and knew where he wanted to go with his own work.

Jury
Feigl was nominated by an independent jury, consisting of chairman Maria Verstappen, artist and winner of the 2013 award together with Erwin Driessens, Arie Altena, publicist at V2_, and Robbert Roos, director of Kunsthal KAdE. From their report: ‘Zoro’s work is immediately appealing. It is of high aesthetic quality, and expands the visual language of minimalism in the arts by introducing the dimension of time. Thanks to his strong powers of imagination – with the magic of movement and repetition producing an enchanting, even almost hypnotic, effect – Feigl is able to reach a wide and varied audience: culture lovers and technology enthusiasts, young and old, experienced and inexperienced. Although his work is extremely accessible, it never relies on cheap aesthetics, making Zoro Feigl a powerful voice in the contemporary art world.’

ECHO
Feigl's work was on display in Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, and Museum Voorlinden, as well as in the Verbeke Foundation (Belgium), China, Japan, Brazil, Russia, Italy and Bulgaria. In 2017, King Willem Alexander 'turned on' the work of art ECHO at the opening of the renovated government office building in The Hague, which houses the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, among others.

The prize
The Witteveen+Bos Art+Technology Award consists of a cash prize of € 15,000, a book about the artist’s oeuvre and an exhibition in the Bergkerk in Deventer (from 2 November to 2 December 2018). Zoro Feigl is the 17th winner in the row. Previous winners included Theo Jansen (2002), John Körmeling (2006), Dick Raaijmakers (2011) and Iris van Herpen (2016).