The effort to foster and benefit the arts in the founders’ fatherland forms the core of the foundation’s charter, which was signed on 20 January 1902 by brewer Carl Jacobsen and his wife, Ottilia Jacobsen.
‘We strive to promote the role of art in Danish society, and the art awards are the foundation’s way of celebrating individuals who make an important contribution and help to shape both the present and the future of Danish art and museum activities,’ says the chairman of the New Carlsberg Foundation, Karsten Ohrt.
The award recipients are:
The New Carlsberg Foundation’s Artist Grant 2015 of DKK 100,000:
Kirstine Roepstorff
and
Christian Lemmerz
Carl Jacobsen’s Museum Professional Grant 2015 of DKK 150,000:
Anne Højer Petersen, Fuglsang Kunstmuseum
The New Carlsberg Foundation’s Honorary Grant 2015 of DKK 250,000:
Frank Birkebæk, Roskilde Museum
The New Carlsberg Foundation’s Honorary Grant is awarded in recognition of an outstanding and persistent effort of local, national and international significance. As the head of Roskilde Museum since 1979, Museum Director and historian Frank Birkebæk has put in a selfless, visionary, effective and goal-oriented effort. A consummate professional, he places communication and audience considerations high on the agenda, both at the museum and in the many other initiatives he spearheads or is involved in. As an important achievement, the Danish Museum of Rock Music, which Frank Birkebæk initiated ten years ago, is due to open this year.
Museum Director Anne Højer Petersen, MA (research degree), receives Carl Jacobsen’s Museum Professional Grant for her visionary and dedicated professional effort at the helm of the art museum Fuglsang Kunstmuseum, which during her eighteen-year leadership has developed into one Denmark’s leading museums with regard to art history research and a wide range of initiatives aimed at a broad audience. In a bold and experimental approach, the museum creates an interplay between art and other domains, including music, meteorology, astronomy and literature.
Kirstine Roepstorff receives the New Carlsberg Foundation’s Artist Grant for her unique contributions to art. She collects diverse objects and images and uses them in her artworks, thus creating her own statement of connections and coherence. The coherence that Roepstorff conjures up in her collages is anything but obvious and often startling, it has a mind of its own, and, above all, it takes on a strong textural quality when she exhibits and confronts the individual components.
Christian Lemmerz is awarded the New Carlsberg Foundation’s Artist Grant for his work, which contains confrontational repulsiveness as well as classic beauty – with and without thorns. Often with. Art should be radical. Art should have form – should become form. And form should be shaped. Lemmerz masters that. In the utmost; to extremes.
