Pierre Huyghe Wins Fondation Simone et Cino Del Duca’s Grand Prix

French multidisciplinary artist Pierre Huyghe has won the Fondation Simone et Cino Del Duca’s 2024 Grand Prix Artistique on the recommendation of the Académie des Beaux-Arts,ArtReviewreports. The honor, attended by a €100,000 ($107,000) purse, is given in recognition of Huyghe’s lifetime contribution to the arts. He will receive the prize at a ceremony to be held June 19 at the Institut de France, Paris.

The Simone and Cino Del Duca Foundation was established in 1975 by Simone Del Duca in honor of her husband, philanthropist Cino Del Duca, with the goal of promoting the arts, letters, and sciences in France and elsewhere. The Grand Prix Artistique is presented annually to a practitioner in the field of sculpture, painting, or musical composition, with the focus shifting to a different field each year. Two Prix de Confirmation of €25,000 are awarded each year to those working in each of the other two disciplines.

The Paris-born Huyghe is known for installations featuring flora and fauna brought into proximity with inanimate materials and technology, as embodied in works such as Untilled (Liegender Frauenakt) (Reclining Female Nude), a 2012 concrete sculpture of a female form with an inhabited beehive for a head, and After Alife Ahead, 2017, for which he created inside a disused ice rink a complex ecosystem whose climate conditions corresponded to the rate at which cancer cells divide and multiply inside an incubator. His solo exhibition “Liminal” is on view at the Punta della Dogana in Venice through November 24.