Art Prize »junger westen«
The history of the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, founded in 1950 in a former high-rise bunker, is closely interwoven with the artists' group »junger westen«. When the Second World War ended, Recklinghausen was also faced with a completely new beginning for all exhibition and collection activities. But as early as 1947, Franz Große-Perdekamp, who later became the director of the Kunsthalle, invited artists from the Rhineland-Westphalia region to an exhibition and encouraged them to form a group. The artists' group »junger westen« was formed around the painters Gustav Deppe, Thomas Grochowiak and Emil Schumacher, Heinrich Siepmann, Hans Werdehausen and the sculptor Ernst Hermanns, whose increasingly abstract visual language gave contemporary expression to the attitude to life in the industrial region on the Rhine and Ruhr.
In 1948, the city of Recklinghausen donated the »junger westen« art prize, which was initially awarded for the best achievements at the annual exhibitions of the group and its guests. First announced publicly in 1956, the prize is now endowed with 10,000 euros and is awarded every two years alternately in the genres of painting, sculpture, sculpture, installation, graphics, drawing and photography.
The prizewinners include Karl Otto Götz, Emil Schumacher and HAP Grieshaber, Horst Antes and Gerhard Richter, Ansgar Nierhoff, Matthias Mansen, Susanne Paesler, Peter Piller, Michael Sailstorfer, Jan Paul Evers and, most recently, Florian Meisenberg, Max Leiß and Ugur Ulusoy. If this kaleidoscope of names resembles a brief history of German art from 1945 to the present day, the works acquired by the prizewinners form the decisive focus of the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen's collection.