The winner of the DESTE Prize 2013 was announced on Monday, September 9, 2013, during an award ceremony that took place at the Museum of Cycladic art.
On behalf of the Jury Committee, Ms. Bice Curiger, curator of Kunsthalle Zurich, made the following announcement:
“It is a pleasure to announce to you in the name of all the jurors the winner of the 2013 DESTE Prize, a prize which is awarded every two years to a Greek or Cypriot artist living in Greece or abroad, and presented here, in the beautiful spaces of the Museum of Cycladic Art.
It is noteworthy that the quality of this year’s exhibition of all of the six shortlisted artists is very remarkable and didn’t make our decision easy. We would also like to mention that we were particularly grateful that the artists accepted to present their works personally, answering our questions.
And now the prize: We are very happy to announce that the prize is going to be awarded to Kostas Sahpazis for his complex sculptural work, a work which is introducing an oscillating force into all sorts of defined categories of art and art history, while revolving around ideas of subtle destabilization. It seems that Kostas Sahpazis is at times creating a painting while piling up materials into delicately calibrated stacks, or accumulating objects that are and are not always what they pretend to be. Here the very concrete and the abstract meet. Drawings are made in space, sometimes reflecting ‘figurative’ elements like a citation or a portrait of the surrounding world and blurring their meaning.”
The DESTE Prize was established in 1999 and is awarded biennially to a Greek or Cypriot artist living in Greece or abroad. The prize aims to showcase an emerging generation of artists and is integral to the foundation’s policy of supporting and promoting contemporary art. The winner of the prize is selected by an international Jury of six and is awarded the amount of €10,000.
For more information on the DESTE Prize, please visit