The main purpose of the Henkel CEE Art.Award. initiated by Henkel Central Eastern Europe, dedicated in the year 2003 to the field of photography, is to raise awareness of Central and Eastern Europe as a culturally significant area.

Henkel CEE successfully persuaded KulturKontakt Austria to serve as a partner in this project. KulturKontakt Austria has been managing arts projects in Central and Eastern Europe for more than ten years. Each year, it invites applicants from Central and Eastern European countries to participate in its “Artists in Residence“ program.

The international jury had a challenging task, faced with selecting the winner of the Henkel Art.Award. from 179 applicants. The jury which examined the submitted projects and selected Vidmantas Ilciukas as the award winner, consisted of Ms. Monika Faber, curator of the photo collection at the Albertina museum; Mr. Vaclav Macek, founder of the Bratislava Photography Festival; Ms. Mila Preslova, photographer from Prague; Ms. Gudrun Schreiber representing the Arts Department at the office of the Austrian Chancellor; Mr. Christoph Freiherr von Braun, owner of the photo gallery “F 5.6” in Munich and Ms. Sabine Schauer, Head of Corporate Communications at Henkel Central Eastern Europe.

The 44-year-old Lithuanian painter and photographer Vidmantas Ilciukas quickly convinced the international jury of the extraordinarily complex visual quality of the photos he submitted. The diversity of his pictures is based on a psychological and a technical component, playing with cognitive and perceptual phenomena as well as the possibilities made possible by film and camera.

Ilciukas places several photographs which were taken at various intervals of time and space on top of each other. These pictures are experienced simultaneously, however not as a single entity, but rather as an insoluble quantity of bits of information. Together, they give the impression of creating a surging mass, a floating fullness, marked by lighter and yet tightly pressed movements. At the same time, the pictures are undoubtedly photographic, leading one to form definite associations with painting. The broken forms remind us of cubism, because one believes he recognizes one and the same picture element repeatedly. Viewing the photos makes us think of pointillism, due to the effortlessness of the many small areas of color. They are responsible for the spatial illusions, though not appearing to be stacked up in depth.

“Vidmantas Ilciukas demonstrates an approach to working with photography, which goes far beyond ‘classical’ double exposure and, at the same time, can manage without the use of computers. For this reason, he succeeds in blending features from both painting and photography, in a manner which is both new and unique,“ according to Ms. Monika Faber, spokesperson for the jury.

To promote young aspiring artists, Henkel awarded the “Young Artists Prize,” an additional cash grant of 1,500 Euro, to one of the twelve winners of the “Artists in Residence“ program of KulturKontakt Austria. The winner is the Polish artist Marzena Nowak, who was granted prize money amounting to 1,500 Euro in addition to the three-month scholarship in Vienna sponsored by KulturKontakt Austria.