Art Basel’s Baloise Art Prize Goes to Xinyi Cheng, Giulia Cenci -ARTnews

With Art Basel now open to the public, the fair has revealed the winners of awards related to the event. The fair’s Baloise Art Prize has been awarded to Xinyi Cheng and Giulia Cenci, both of whom have work on view at Art Basel, and Lu Yang was named the winner of the BMW Art Journey Award.

Cheng and Cenci will be awarded CHF 30,000 (roughly the same amount in U.S. dollars) by Baloise, a Swiss insurance holding company. Works by the artists will be donated by Baloise to the National Galerie-Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art (MUDAM) in Luxembourg. Cenci, who is based in Amsterdam, mainly produces sculptures and immersive installations, and Cheng, who is based in Paris, is known for her paintings.

The Baloise prize to work on view in the “Statements” section of Art Basel. Cheng and Cenci’s work was brought to the fair by Balice Hertling (of Paris) and SpazioA (Pistoia, Italy), respectively. The recipients were chosen by a panel including Marie-Noëlle Farcy, the curator and head of collection at MUDAM; Gabriele Knapstein, the head of Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin; Harald Falckenberg, who works with Sammlung Falckenberg; Lionel Bovier, the director of the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva; and Martin Schwander, Baloise’s fine art adviser and head of the jury.

Through the BMW Art Journey Award, Lu will travel through Indonesia, India, and Japan to study traditional and contemporary dance, with the ultimate goal of reinterpreting the movement she witnesses through robotics. She said in a statement, “This is not just an art journey. It will be a wonderful start for me to open a new chapter of my creation.”

The Shanghai-based artist was chosen unanimously by an international jury consisting of Claire Hsu, director of the Asia Art Archive; Matthias Mühling, director of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau in Munich; Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, the president of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and an ARTnews “Top 200” collector; Philip Tinari, director of the UCCA Contemporary Art Center in Beijing; and artist Samson Young, the winner of the first BMW Art Journey.