Ernesto Neto Receives 2014 Aspen Award for Art

The Aspen Art Museum (AAM) announces the selection of renowned contemporary artist Ernesto Neto as the recipient of the museum's 2014 Aspen Award for Art. The award will be presented to the artist on Friday, August 1, 2014, during the museum's 10th annual ArtCrush summer benefit gala and the night prior the official ribbon-cutting ceremony for the AAM's highly anticipated, new 33,000-square-foot Shigeru Ban-designed facility in Aspen's downtown core.

Neto's Aspen Award for Art presentation comes during the exhibition of his two new site-specific installation works spanning the upper and lower galleries of the AAM's current facility-the final exhibition scheduled within the current home of the non-collecting institution. The exhibition will be on view from June 6-September 2, 2014.

The AAM's Aspen Award for Art is given each year to an artist who has made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary art. Past artist-honorees are: Teresita Ferna?ndez (2013), Tom Sachs (2012), Roni Horn (2011), Marilyn Minter (2010), Fred Tomaselli (2009), Ed Ruscha (2008), Jim Hodges (2007), Tony Feher (2006), and Richard Tuttle (2005).

Ernesto Saboia de Albuquerque Neto was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1964, where he currently lives and works. Neto has achieved international acclaim for his large-scale, immersive environments that alter and heighten our perceptions of our surroundings. Often involving stretchy, semitransparent fabric, aromatic spices, and, more recently, crochet, his installations have an organic, biomorphic character evoking skin and internal bodily systems that challenge the notion of sculpture as static object, and investigate the ways that alterations to space and environment transform relations between people. In engaging with this dialogue, Neto draws upon and extends both the abstract modernism of Alexander Calder, Hans Arp, and Constantin Brancusi, as well as the sensuous, performative practices of such Brazilian-artist predecessors as Lygia Clark and He?lio Oiticica.

Since the mid-1990s, Neto has produced a widely exhibited and influential body of contemporary sculpture and installation. Recent exhibitions include The Insides Are on the Outside | O interior esta? no exterior, Casa de Vidro Lina Bo Bardi, Sa?o Paulo, Brazil, 2013 (group); Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates, 2013 (group); El Cuerpo que me me lleva | The Body that Carries Me, Guggenheim Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain, 2014 (solo); Cuddle on the Tightrope, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, 2012 (solo); La lengua de ernesto: retrospectiva 1987-2011, Museo de Arte Contempora?neo de Monterrey, MARCO, Mexico; traveling to Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City, Mexico, 2011-12 (solo); Ernesto Neto: O Bicho SusPensa na PaisaGen, Los Molinos Exhibition Hall, Faena Art District, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2011 (solo); Ernesto Neto: The Edges of the World, Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, UK, 2010 (solo); Ernesto Neto: Intimacy, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway, 2010 (solo), among many others.