Hugo Canoilas, Kapsch Contemporary Art Prize winner 2020, uses the tradition and history of painting and object art to redefine and expand the connection between installational and performative strategies. Along with art history, he also references sociopolitical developments and the philosophical and art-theoretical discourses it involves. Currently, the all-dominating coronavirus crisis is already bringing into sharper focus virulent and interconnected topics such as the climate crisis, environmental degradation, and the ever-widening gap between poor and rich countries.
Canoilas’s work deals with these developments and the anthropocentric worldview on which they are based. It ties in with ideas of a careful and egalitarian human treatment of nature and its creatures—ideas that have evolved in ongoing discourses around the Anthropocene and Posthumanism.