The New Carlsberg Foundation’s Art Awards 2022

With the art awards, the New Carlsberg Foundation celebrates individuals who are making a special contribution to the Danish art and museum landscape. 

The New Carlsberg Foundation’s Honorary Grant

This award is given to one or more persons working in the service of the arts who have demonstrated exceptional professional ambitions over time and have had a significant impact on the Danish art world.

The New Carlsberg Foundation’s Honorary Grant 2022 is awarded to Elmgreen & Dragset

Elmgreen & Dragset

Underneath a strong immediate appeal, often with easily decoded symbolism and more than a touch of humour, Elmgreen & Dragset’s art always contains a deeper aspect of critique of our prejudices and assumptions about the world as well as the courage to challenge the current structures of power, whether political, cultural or, for that matter, commercial. In particular, the New Carlsberg Foundation wishes to acknowledge Elmgreen & Dragset’s outstanding ability to create works of art for the public space.

The New Carlsberg Foundation’s Artist Grant

This award is given to one or more artists who stand out, both in Denmark and abroad, with courage, originality and impact.

The New Carlsberg Foundation’s Artist Grant 2022 is awarded to two artists: Lea Porsager and Tue Greenfort.

Lea Porsager

Lea Porsager has a burning artistic vision, a powerful intellect and the ability to achieve results in collaboration with others. She has made a name for herself through decorative projects in the public space, firmly establishing her position as an artist who delivers an unexpected conceptual perspective. Lea Porsager is recognized by the New Carlsberg Foundation for bringing an exceptional conceptual position to Danish contemporary art. For unique and wild art in the public space. And for her unparalleled coupling of the spiritual and scientific realms that shows us alternative positions of visual art.

Tue Greenfort

The exceptional quality of Tue Greenfort’s practice is not actually that he is a pioneer of eco-art. That he was a trailblazer, the first to plant the flag. Rather, it is the opposite: it is that he makes us study the ground beneath our feet. This ground is not just about ecology, ecosystems or climate, about eco-art and climate art. A climate model only includes the data the scientists are able to process; numbers they can crunch. By contrast, Tue Greenfort’s art is bustling with all sorts of other factors and aspects that we cannot account for. It is for his contributions to this landscape that Tue Greenfort receives the New Carlsberg Foundation’s Artist Grant.

Carl Jacobsen’s Museum Professional Grant

This award is given to one or more museum professionals who with considerable insight and professionalism manage to create revitalizing and developing settings for the representation of art.  

The Carl Jacobsen’s Museum Professional Grant 2022 is given to two museum professionals: Astrid la Cour, director of Frederiksbergmuseerne (The Frederiksberg Museums) and Pia Wirnfeldt, director of CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark.

Astrid la Cour

With Cisternerne (The Cisterns), which is part of Frederiksbergmuseerne, Astrid la Cour has made a big splash in the Danish and international art world, turning these inherently spooky, unpleasant, unhospitable spaces into the setting of exquisite, extremely generous encounters with art. Encounters where we are, on the one hand, essentially alone, each of us thrust back upon ourselves in the dark, while also, on the other, hand, becoming part of a shared experience of that particular experience. Loneliness and community. A core value in our engagement with art that Astrid la Cour and Cisternerne make brilliantly clear.

Pia Wirnfeldt

It takes a competent, responsible and committed leader to shape, run and develop a place such as CLAY. Pia Wirnfeldt is awarded Carl Jacobsen’s Museum Professional Grant 2022 for her dedicated, ambitious, creative and thorough effort to build a museum that operates on a high professional level, in both a national and an international context. A museum that communicates and activates an outstanding collection in innovative and engaging ways and which ties together new and old, the Little Belt Strait and the wider world in beauty and harmony.