Exhibition “The Hugo Boss Prize 2020: Deana Lawson, Centropy” opens at the Guggenheim Museum

Deana Lawson, Barrington and Father, 2021. ( © Deana Lawson, courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

From May 7 to October 11, 2021, an exhibition of new and recent works by artist Deana Lawson, winner of the 2020 HUGO BOSS PRIZE, will be on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Lawson’s presentation will include largescale photographs and holograms. In addition, the museum is producing a film exploring Lawson’s practice that will be released in the early fall.

Lawson is the 13th artist to receive the biennial Prize, which was established by HUGO BOSS and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation 25 years ago to recognize significant achievement in contemporary art. She was selected as the winner in 2020 from a short list of six finalists including Nairy Baghramian, Kevin Beasley, Elias Sime, Cecilia Vicuña and Adrián Villar Rojas.

Deana Lawson, who lives and works in New York, creates powerful images reflecting Black diasporic identity, combining familiar domestic settings with carefully calibrated staging, lighting, and pose. By fusing elements of family photography with historical portraiture in this way, Lawson creates a space somewhere between the everyday and the intangible, the mundane and the magnificent: a space that emphasizes identity but also agency. Each work takes place in the context of a larger project, linking back to the aesthetics and community of the Black diaspora that she documents, often featuring strangers that she comes across in everyday life.

Since its inception in 1996, the HUGO BOSS PRIZE has been awarded to Matthew Barney (1996), Douglas Gordon (1998), Marjetica Potrč (2000), Pierre Huyghe (2002), Rirkrit Tiravanija (2004), Tacita Dean (2006), Emily Jacir (2008), Hans-Peter Feldmann (2010), Danh Vo (2012), Paul Chan (2014), Anicka Yi (2016) and Simone Leigh (2018).