650 artists have submitted works for the Armin Sandig Prize for Painting and Drawing. 29 are represented in the exhibition starting February 26 in the Freiheitshalle Hof - initially online as a 3D animation. The main prize of 5,000 euros goes to the Berlin painter Hermann Rudorf; the young talent prize (1,500 euros) goes to Lena Ader.

The city of Hof and the Kunstverein Hof had called for entries to the competition, which commemorates the painter Armin Sandig, who was born in Hof in 1929. The project was significantly supported by the Armin Sandig Foundation from Hamburg, where the namesake, who died in 2015, had lived and worked since 1951. The prize money is provided by the Dr. Hans Vießmann Foundation.

Mayor Eva Döhla emphasizes in her contribution to the catalog: "The Armin Sandig Prize can help to anchor the artist's name as a source of inspiration and a seal of quality, particularly in the world of contemporary painting and drawing."

Ralf Sziegoleit, a cultural journalist from Hof, writes in the catalog about Hermann Rudorf, the recipient of the main prize: "He was born in Hof in 1956, studied in Nuremberg under Ernst Weil - who had exhibited in Hof in 1948 together with the then 19-year-old Armin Sandig - and in Berlin under the artists Herbert Sturm and Allen Jones. Rudorf had his first exhibition in 1980 in a cultural pub, the Galeriehaus in Hof. When he joined the 'Neue Wilde' five years later and showed not only landscapes but also figures - garish, agitated, dramatic - he emphasized that the motif was basically just a pretext. A tree at the center of a picture should simply be seen as a diagonal, as an element of the composition. He remained true to this principle over the decades. But his pictures changed. They were sometimes grey and sometimes colorful, sometimes figurative and sometimes non-representational, sometimes very large and sometimes very small. In 'color spaces', which he presented in 2000, he shook the boundaries between color fields of the same size, explored the 'geometry of color', and everything seemed to float, was light and fresh. Five years later, he presented a catalog portfolio under the title 'lapidar', which stemmed from his longing to grasp the simple things as the basic building blocks of life in a world that had become complex and impenetrable. Rudorf left his hometown in 1989 and has lived and worked in Berlin ever since, but has remained in constant contact with Hof - also through exhibitions."

Lena Ader, who was awarded the prize, also lives in Berlin. She was born in Heidelberg in 1988 and studied fine art at the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences in Alster/Bonn. The catalog states: "The jury in the competition for the Armin Sandig Prize reacted with surprise and fascination to her three paintings on a subject she has been working on since 2012. Two of the three paintings she submitted belong to the 'Annihilation' cycle, the third to the 'The Tired Animal' series. What they have in common is the watercolor-like painting style and the color reduction, but above all they are united by the fact that women are always acting or 'being acted upon'. As the title 'Annihilation' suggests, there is always violence involved, but it is not real violence, rather processes are shown that have no direct connection to reality and therefore do not convey a clear message. Lena Ader herself says that she wants to make inner states visible; her motifs create ambivalence and refuse a clear interpretation. According to the jury, they cause emotional sympathy, disturbance - and also fascination - in the viewer."

A catalog of the exhibition is available from the Department of Culture of the City of Hof (kultur@stadt-hof.de) for €10.00. In addition to a detailed text by Ralf Sziegoleit on the competition, the prizewinners and the project's namesake, all 29 artists who made it into the exhibition are represented with two or three works. The almost 90-page hardcover catalog, which can also be found and ordered in bookshops thanks to its ISBN number, was published by the Kunstverein Hof e.V. and the City of Hof with the kind support of the Armin Sandig Foundation and the Dr. Hans Vießmann Foundation.

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