These are the award winners in the Annual Exhibition 2022

Now the award ceremony for the Annual Exhibition 2022 has been completed, and we can reveal that Camilla Luihn has been awarded the Art Handcraft Prize from the Visual Artists' Aid Fund for the work "What remains". Astrid Sleire has been awarded Finn Erik Alsos' memorial prize for the works "Flak – Grønt" and "Flak – Rosa og rødt", and Masoud Alireza receives NK's debutant prize for the work "Untitled".

The arts and crafts award is presented to the artist behind the most striking work at the Norwegian Craftsmen's Annual Exhibition. The winner is awarded NOK 200,000 and receives an offer from RAM Galleri in Oslo for exhibition space in autumn/winter the following year. This year the Handicraft Prize from the Fine Arts Aid Fund went to Camilla Luihn for the work What's left (2022). 

The work takes shape as an installation consisting of a myriad of objects. Here, hand-shaped enamelled copper figures lie side by side with found objects. A fart skeleton, a brown banana, a peanut, a bird's head, a smoke, a receipt etc. Together they form a detailed and fascinating installation. The objects' everyday motifs contrast with their materiality as beautiful, delicate enamel brooches. Individually, they have a decorative use value, but together they form a comprehensive installation, which can be exhibited in museums and galleries. Read the jury's full reasoning here.

Camilla Luihn (1968) lives and works in Oslo and completed her MA from KHIO in 1994. She has an extensive career with solo exhibitions and a number of group exhibitions in Norway and internationally, and her works are represented in the major public collections in Norway. In 2014, Luihn initiated the artist group ARKIVET, and she founded and is the editor of the Norwegian Metal and Jewelery Artists Register (NOMEKURE). Luihn combines his studio in Kirkeristen in Oslo with the Portabel display room, which shows exhibitions with Norwegian and international artists, and since 2019 has been employed as a university lecturer at KHiO, subject area metal and jewelry art.

Find Erik Alsos' memorial prize for Astrid Sleire
The commemorative prize will go to the artist behind a work in the Annual Exhibition that marks a particularly innovative and qualitatively strong development in the person concerned's own artistry and/or in the field in general. Throughout his artistry, this year's winner of the Finn Erik Alsos memorial prize creates a semantics that helps move the field forward. The jury is proud to be able to award the prize to Astrid Sleire for the works Flak – Green and Flak – Pink and red (2022).

The works are set up as compositions, as an interaction between individual forms that together hold a spatial conversation. The forms become like pictorial characters with their own formal grammar. Order, distance, displacement and depth add rhythm and follow a separate syntax. The edges, the glaze, the colors and the matting support the formal composition and give the shapes different functions in the sentence. Read the jury's full reasoning here.

Astrid Sleire (1961) majored in ceramics from the Norwegian State College of Crafts and Design in Bergen in 1988 and has participated with works in invited and juried exhibitions both nationally and internationally. She works with abstract sculptures in clay that should be able to give associations to a fundamental and concrete landscape. The works can be seen as fragments that refer to a changing environment, to what remains unfinished but is constantly evolving. The works have been purchased by institutions and museums, and she has carried out several public decoration commissions. On a daily basis, she works in her studio at Kunstnerverksteder cs55 and as an associate professor in the specialist area ceramics and clay, Academy of Fine Arts - Department of Contemporary Art, KMD, UiB.

The Debutant Award to Masoud Alireza
The debutant prize goes to an artist who has not previously participated in the Annual Exhibition, for the debutant work in the exhibition that the jury believes stands out the strongest in terms of artistic quality and contemporary relevance. Norwegian Artisans' Debutante Prize went this year to Masoud Alireza for the work Untitled (2021).

The work has a strong physical presence. The immediate experience is emotional and almost unsettling as it hovers in front of us and makes the surroundings atmospheric and strange. The experience is ambiguous, because the work appears both as hard and defined and as light and moving at the same time. It remains at a point of balance between the massive and the volatile – much because it is not obvious which material we are dealing with. The work triggers curiosity and invites wonder. Read the jury's full reasoning here.
Masoud Alireza (1985) is an independent artist, activist and writer based in Bergen. He was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1985 and graduated with an MFA from KMD, UiB, in 2018. He considers the inherent function and limits of the material, such as in graphite and paper, as the starting point for form. Through his work, he challenges the boundary between three-dimensional space and two-dimensional perception, with the desire to evoke a pre-linguistic aesthetic experience and transform the work into an arena for encounters with natural forces. He recently exhibited at Nye_bokboden and Hordaland Art Center in Bergen, and has previously taught at Elmo Farhang University and exhibited in Tehran and Berlin.