For more than seventy years, Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911, Paris) has stood at the vanguard of the visual arts, continuing to produce new bodies of work with inimitable energy and restless innovation. Moving freely between abstraction and figuration, her richly allusive symbolic idiom gives form to memories and emotions, at once exposing facets of her personal experience and resonating with universal significance. At age 97, Bourgeois continues to make art every day. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally and was the subject of a major retrospective organized in 2008 by Tate Modern, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris, which was also presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2008); the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (2008); and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2009). Bourgeois received the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton in 1997 and the French Legion of Honor medal from President Sarkozy in 2008.

The artistic practice of Urs Fischer (b. 1973, Zurich) is founded on a radical investigation of the possibilities of the creative process. Deploying startling combinations of materials and drawing on the structures of varied artistic modes, Fischer creates ambitious sculptural works and environmental installations that are provocative, playful, and disorienting. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions including the Insititute of Contemporary Art, London (2000); the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2000); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2004); Kunsthaus Zürich (2004); Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2005); and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2006). In fall 2009, Fischer will be the subject of a museum-wide exhibition at the New Museum in New York.

Dan Graham (b. 1942, Urbana, Illinois) began his career in the early 1960s as a part of a new generation of Conceptual and Minimalist artists working in New York. Much of his early work occurred outside the gallery with projects such as the insertion of texts into mass-market magazines. In the 1970s, he worked primarily with performance, film, and video to explore shifts in individual and group consciousness and the limits of private and public space, evolving in the 1980s into the installations and architectural pavilions for which he is internationally known today. In 2001, he was awarded the French Vermeil Medal by the City of Paris. In 2001–02, a comprehensive retrospective of his work was shown at the Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Serralves, Porto, and traveled throughout Europe. He is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

WINNER

Mary Heilmann (b. 1940, San Francisco) has been working as a painter in New York since 1968. She arrived in the midst of the Conceptual movement and drew inspiration from the work of Joseph Beuys, Lee Bontecou, Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Marisol, and Bruce Nauman. Heilmann’s practice is characterized by her experimentation with vibrant color and abstract composition that elicits a sense of movement and rhythm. In addition to many solo and group exhibitions worldwide, a retrospective of her work was organized in 2007 and traveled to the Contemporary Art Museum Houston; the Orange County Museum, Newport Beach, California; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2008); and the New Museum, New York (2008).

Klaus Biesenbach is Chief Curator of the Department of Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There, he recently organized Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) (2008–09), Projects 87: Sigalit Landau (2008), and Douglas Gordon: Timeline (2006), and co-organized Take your time: Olafur Eliasson (2008) and Doug Aitken: sleepwalkers (2007). Biesenbach’s upcoming projects include Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, the first large-scale performance retrospective of the artist’s work, opening in March 2010, and William Kentridge: Five Themes, opening in February 2010. Biesenbach was recently appointed Director of P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York, and will assume this role in January 2010.

Daniel Birnbaum has been the director of the Städelschule Art Academy and its Portikus Gallery, both in Frankfurt am Main, since 2000. He is the founder (with Isabelle Graw) of the Institut für Kunstkritik. In 2003, he was cocurator of the Venice Biennale and cocurated the first Moscow Biennial in 2005. Together with Christine Macel, he curated Airs de Paris at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2007, which celebrated the institution’s thirtieth anniversary. In 2008, he organized the exhibition Fifty Moons of Saturn in Turin, and he was director of the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. He is the author of several books on art and philosophy including The Hospitality of Presence (1998); Production (2000), a collaboration with artist Carsten Höller; Chronology (2005); and As a Weasel Sucks Eggs (2008).

WINNER

Connie Butler is the Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), a position she has held since February 2006. From 1996 to 2006, she was Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA). Butler has curated numerous exhibitions of contemporary art focusing primarily on the postwar period, working extensively with emerging artists. She curated a monographic exhibition of Marlene Dumas, which opened in June 2008 and was organized by MoCA in association with MoMA. She has curated several installations of MoMA’s permanent collection and was the curator of WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, an international survey of feminist art, which opened at MoCA in March 2007.

Butler is currently organizing exhibitions of work by artists Paul Sietsema and Artur Żmijewski, both scheduled to open at MoMA in fall 2009. She is co-organizing the exhibition On Line: Redefining Drawing in the Twentieth Century, scheduled to open at MoMA in fall 2010.

Massimiliano Gioni is the Artistic Director of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Milan and the Director of Special Exhibitions at the New Museum in New York. He was recently named the director of the 8th Gwangju Biennal for 2010. Gioni curated the 4th Berlin Biennale (2006) with Maurizio Cattelan and Ali Subotnick, with whom he founded the Wrong Gallery in 2002. Gioni also cocurated Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian, Spain (2004) and curated The Zone, a special project for the 50th Venice Biennial, in 2003. In 2009, Gioni curated exhibitions including Parts of a Movie with a Rat and a Bear and Still Life for Fondazione Nicola Trussardi and A Guest + A Host = A Ghost for Deste Foundation–Dakis Joannou Collection in Athens. At the New Museum, he has curated After Nature (2008), cocurated The Generational: Younger Than Jesus (2009), and is curating the upcoming Urs Fischer: Marguerite De Ponty.

Drawn from public and private collections around the world, this landmark exhibition consisted of some sixty-five paintings, complemented by never-before-seen works and a room of archival material from the Francis Bacon estate. It was arranged broadly chronologically to emphasize the fact that, though Bacon's underlying philosophy remained remarkably consistent, his subject matter and means of painting changed considerably over time. Two rooms focused on two different yet complementary sets of triptychs: the first brought together the three great Crucifixion triptychs Bacon made in 1944, 1962, and 1965; the second, the three triptychs he made between 1971 and 1973 as memorials to his dead lover, George Dyer.

WINNER

For the first time, the Château de Versailles hosted a contemporary artist with the exhibition Jeff Koons Versailles. Koons exhibited seventeen sculptures, which the artist had created over three decades. Koons’s iconic sculptures, like Rabbit, shown in the Salon de l’Abundance, continued the artistic history of Versailles by engaging visitors with contemporary art of the moment and the decorative arts of past generations. The exhibition extended into the gardens with the installation of the large-scale floral sculpture Split-Rocker, planted in the Parterre de l’Orangie within the classical and baroque landscape of Versailles.

Mike Kelley: Educational Complex Onwards, 1995–2008 comprised a large selection of Kelley's recent works—installations, videos, photographs, sculptures, and paintings—on loan from international collections. Conceived as a history in which every work forms a chapter, the exhibition showed how and why Kelley has in recent years used the notion of autobiography to explore in a poetic fashion the forms of power and the power of forms.

This exhibition showcased the way in which Wolfgang Tillmans has reinterpreted genres from portraiture to still life to landscape through the medium of photography. In the early 1990s, Tillmans was recognized for his unconventional portraits of his friends and street subculture. While embracing a broad range of subjects, he also explores abstraction through dark-room experiments with the photographic process. Tillmans was recently awarded the 2009 Kulturpreis of the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Photographie. This retrospective exhibition celebrated more than twenty years of Tillmans's photographic work.

Organized by Lisa Oppenheim and Jessie Washburne-Harris, A Twilight Art examined the ways contemporary artists working in photography respond to issues of photographic process and media specificity. Digital technologies and the impending obsolescence of many conventional photographic technologies have led to a renewed interest in looking at how meaning is produced though and from image making. A Twilight Art presented a diverse range of artists—including Tauba Auerbach, Sarah Charlesworth, Alan McCollum, and Wolfgang Tillmans—working through these questions across generations, geographies, and through both abstract and representational modes.

WINNER

Conceived by Urs Fischer and Gavin Brown, this exhibition, which included works by Keith Haring, Sarah Lucas, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, and Rudolf Stingel, among others, attempted to intuitively create a “community” of objects and pictures whose collisions and free associations unshackled and unleashed the interpretations repressed within them. With Fischer's mammoth wall installation wall paper enveloping the gallery, the exhibition juxtaposed and demonstrated how each work of art has many selves hidden within and how forces outside the frame constantly embed and limit a work.

This exhibition presented seventy-three works by forty-three artists, ranging from painting, drawing, and sculpture to collage and video by artists such as Joseph Cornell, Rodney Graham, and Yoko Ono. In the words of curator Todd Levin, “Within this group exhibition one senses that boundaries are being tested, and rules of art conduct are being subverted. . . . But even when these artists systematically subvert themselves for the devious pleasure of it, they still maintain a level of control where they strange can be made familiar—and vice versa. Ideas, rendered in these artists' distinctive lo-fi argot, feel aired out and simplified without being rendered trivial. A sense of satisfactory unsatisfaction remains. The artwork featured in Your Gold Teeth II is about the opening up of ideas and approaches, not the pin-point sharpening of them.”

ZERO in New York was the first survey in the United States of works by members of the ZERO group. It concentrated on the movement’s artistic output between 1957 and 1966, examining the collaborative relationship that developed between groups of artists in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Henk Peeters, Jan Schoonhoven, Lucio Fontana, Jef Verheyen, and Yves Klein. The exhibition was organized by David Leiber, Director of Sperone Westwater, and Mattijs Visser, Founding Director of the ZERO Foundation.

Unfolding as a visual novel, After Nature surveyed a landscape of wilderness and ruins darkened by uncertain catastrophe. It was a story of abandonment, regression, and rapture—an epic of humanity and nature coming apart under the pressure of obscure forces and not-so-distant environmental disasters. Organized by Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions, the exhibition brought together an international and multigenerational group of artists, including Roger Ballen, Maurizio Cattelan, Nancy Graves, Werner Herzog, and Tino Sehgal, depicting a universe in which humankind is being eclipsed and new ecological systems struggle to find a precarious balance.

WINNER

Organized by Douglas Eklund, Associate Curator in the Department of Photographs, The Pictures Generation was the first comprehensive exhibition to examine the work of young artists who, beginning in the early 1970s, both extended and broke away from Minimalism and Conceptualism by returning to recognizable images as the foundation of their work. Inspired by movies and Pop art, this group of artists, including John Baldessari, Dara Birnbaum, Robert Longo, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman, employed various mediums to explore the ways in which images had come to usurp rather than augment or document reality.

With an international group of fifty-five artists working in a range of media, including James Lee Byars, Lygia Clark, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Bruce Nauman, this exhibition grappled with art’s relationship to many of life’s big questions as they were defined and examined during the pivotal decade of the 1960s and carried forth to the present day. Instead of providing a historical overview of a movement or the period, the show surveyed the preoccupations with mortality, transience, and the unknown that marked much classic Conceptual art, linking these interests to new understandings of time and space that evolved during the 1960s as well as to a younger generation of artists who continue to explore similar subjects in their work. The exhibition was organized by Walker curator Peter Eleey.

Organized by Connie Butler, WACK! was the first comprehensive, historical exhibition to examine the international foundations and legacy of feminist art. Focusing on the crucial period of the 1970s, the show included work by women who operated within the political structure of feminism as well as women who did not necessarily embrace feminism as part of their practice but who were impacted by political and cultural feminism. Comprising work by one hundred twenty artists in a broad range of media—including painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and performance art—the exhibition was organized around themes based on media, geography, formal concerns, collective aesthetic, and political impulses.

The conceptual art making process of Elad Lassry (b. 1977, Tel Aviv) encompasses film, collage, silkscreen, and photography. Working with both appropriated and staged images, he manipulates his subject matter to unearth submerged, nonlinear narratives, interrogating the motives behind the production of visual material with an anthropological precision. He has had solo exhibitions at Cherry and Martin Gallery, Los Angeles (2007); the Art Institute of Chicago (2008); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2009). His work was featured in the 2008 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California, and The Generational: Younger than Jesus at the New Museum, New York (2009). This fall, Lassry has a solo exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, and in 2010, he will be the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zürich.

Daniel McDonald (b. 1971, Los Angeles) began his career as a founding member of the collaborative Art Club 2000 (1992–2000). In his own practice, he uses an interest in horror films, comic books, and action figures to stage humorous tableau which seek to indict the romantic myth of the bohemian artist’s life. His works often align the role of the artist with that of a Hollywood movie monster, drawing attention to the similar stigmas and auras society projects onto each. In keeping with his fascination with horror and theatricality, McDonald also designs his own line of conceptual and absurd costume jewelry. His work has been shown at Salon 94 Freemans, New York (2007); Galerie Riis, Oslo (2009); and Mesler & Hug, Los Angeles (2009).

Marlo Pascual (b. 1972, Nashville, Tennessee) takes found imagery and film as a point of departure, enlarging, repositioning, and juxtaposing fragmentary images—often depicting unknown glamorous women or men—with other photographs, domestic objects, and stage props. Sometimes dramatically lit, the resulting installations and sculptures suggest ambiguous narratives and fictive theatrical settings that blur the boundaries between reality and fantasy. A solo exhibition of the artist's work was organized by the Swiss Institute, New York, in January 2009. Recent group exhibitions include Crop Rotation at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2008); three person show at White Columns, New York (2008); and curated by_vienna ’09 at Georg Kargl, Vienna (2009). Pascual’s work is currently on view as part of the In Practice series at the Sculpture Center, and her first solo gallery exhibition will open in January 2010 at Casey Kaplan, both in New York.

WINNER

The videos of Ryan Trecartin (b. 1981, Webster, Texas) catapult viewers into a hallucinogenic alternate reality in which cybernetic avatars run amok, presenting themselves with gleeful sass as they play out a complex web of melodramatic fictions. The works are filtered through a distinctive do-it-yourself aesthetic that incorporates ramshackle sets, brightly colored homemade costumes, cheap off-the-shelf video and sound effects, and rapidly edited, jargon-filled dialogue. Trecartin draws his audiences further into his virtual reality through sculptural objects and installations built from his sets. His work has been shown at major international institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2006, 2008); the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2006); the Saatchi Gallery, London (2006); the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2009–10); Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin (2008); the New Museum, New York (2009); and the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2009).

In her first series of new work since 2004, photographer Cindy Sherman turned her remarkable observational skills to women in the upper age and income brackets, the class of women who traditionally commission portraits of themselves. She captured clothing, makeup, cosmetic surgery, facial expression, physical build, and body language while also articulating psychological insights into the refusal to bow to the effects of time on one’s body.

WINNER

The first comprehensive retrospective of the work of Piero Manzoni in the United States, this exhibition was curated by Germano Celant. It spanned the entire range of Manzoni’s oeuvre, from his first anthropomorphic silhouettes and canvases bearing the imprints of everyday objects, to the diverse Achromes, Bodies of Air (Corpi d’aria), and Lines (Linea), and finally, to the radically conceptual Artist’s Shit (Merda d’artista) and Living Sculptures. The exhibition also included works by Manzoni’s American and European contemporaries—among them Alberto Burri, Yves Klein, Yayoi Kusama, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella—in order to trace his brief but brilliant career within a broader international context.

For this exhibition, Greene Naftali debuted Paul Sharits's restored four-projector "locational" film installation, Shutter Interface (1975), a room installation that consists of four projectors placed side-by-side on large black pedestals. Their projections partially overlap, effecting live color mixing and creating a horizontal flood of changing hues on an infinite loop. A second gallery presented a wide array of rarely seen works on paper. A pairing of the practical with the fantastical (as in his fashion drawings of the early 1990s) and of mathematically specific formulas with expansive ideals (as in his film scores, colored diagrams, and meditations on Mayan and Aztec monuments) provided insight into Sharits's metaphorically rich process.

Picasso: Mosqueteros was the first exhibition in the United States to focus on Picasso's late paintings in twenty-five years. The exhibition was curated by John Richardson, Picasso’s noted biographer, and Dakin Hart. Focusing on a large group of important, rarely seen works from the collection of Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, as well as from the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museo Picasso Málaga; and other private collections, the exhibition aimed to expand the ongoing inquiry regarding the context, subjects, and sources of the artist’s late work. Presenting selected paintings and prints spanning 1962–72, the exhibition suggested how the portrayal of the aged Picasso, bound to the past in his life and painting, has obscured the highly innovative and contemporary nature of the late work.

Dan Graham: Beyond surveys the artist's career from the mid-1960s to the present. Graham has been at the forefront of many of the most significant developments in art, including Conceptual art, video and film installation, performance, site-specific sculpture, and musical collaboration. This exhibition—his first retrospective in the United States—examines each stage of Graham's career through his photographs, projects for magazine pages, films, architectural models and pavilions, performances, video installations, prints, drawings, writings, and his work with musicians Sonic Youth, Glenn Branca, and Japanther.

Lawrence Weiner: As Far as the Eye Can See marked the first retrospective mounted in the United States of the work of Lawrence Weiner. Combining nearly one hundred twenty works, this exhibition showed Weiner as a prolific artist whose growing, often text-based body of work is profoundly relevant today. Weiner’s ideas have reshaped the terrain of contemporary art in their generosity and simple goals. Like Weiner's oeuvre, the exhibition emphasized choice, personal experience, and looking.

Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton is the first survey of Peyton's work in an American institution. The midcareer retrospective included more than one hundred works made over the past fifteen years. From her earliest portraits of musicians like Jarvis Cocker, Kurt Cobain, and Liam Gallagher to more recent paintings featuring friends and figures from the worlds of art, fashion, cinema, and politics, including Matthew Barney, Marc Jacobs, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Peyton chronicles America at the end of the last century. Her paintings celebrate the aesthetics of youth, fame, and creative genius and are testaments to Peyton's deeper passion for beauty in all its forms, from the elevated to the everyday.

WINNER

Martin Kippenberger's artistic career was a twenty-year commitment to unrestrained excess. It began in the late 1970s, at a moment when the greatness of modern art seemed suddenly distant—a century-long celebration whose door was now closed to newcomers. Kippenberger's response was to create his own party and cast himself as an artist-jester whose antics both disguised and permitted a piercing analysis of contemporary art and society. He channeled creative energy into thousands of works, including paintings, sculptures, installations, drawings, prints, multiples, books, and recordings. Embracing his full range of output and yet by no means comprehensive, The Problem Perspective contributed to the ongoing process of absorbing one of the most inventive and influential bodies of artwork of the late twentieth century.

Tim Griffin has been editor of Artforum since 2003. During that time he has written for the publication on numerous artists, including Chantal Akerman, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Mary Heilmann, Philippe Parreno, and Kelley Walker. He has devoted special issues of the magazine to art and politics, globalization, Minimalism, the legacy of Land art, the rebuilding of New Orleans, and notions of the commons, as well as to such figures as choreographer Michael Clark, philosopher Jacques Rancière, and architect-designer Buckminster Fuller. Griffin's writing has also appeared in venues ranging from October to Vogue, and his essay on John Baldessari, "What do you do?" appears in the catalogue for the artist's retrospective that opens in October 2009 at Tate Modern in London.

John Kelsey is a New York–based writer, artist, and gallerist. As a contributing editor at Artforum, he has written about the artists Michael Krebber and Cosima Von Bonin. His most recent contribution was a feature length review of the exhibition theanyspacewhatever (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008–09). Over the years he has contributed to exhibition catalogues for Rachel Harrison, Charline von Heyl, Richard Prince, Charles Ray, and Christopher Williams, among many other artists. In 2008, he participated in the symposium “Canvases and Careers” at the Staedlschule in Frankfurt, at which he presented "The Hack," an essay that considered the contemporary function of art criticism in its relation to post-Fordist production in general. Also in 2008, Semiotext(e) published Kelsey's translation of Michele Bernstein's All the King's Horses, which was previously distributed in the form of a zine at Reena Spaulings Fine Art.

Walter Robinson was an editor at Art in America magazine from 1978 until 1996 and has been editor of Artnet Magazine since its founding 13 years ago, writing the columns “Weekend Update” and “Art Market Report.” Robinson copublished his own art magazine in SoHo for several years in the 1970s and was art editor of the East Village Eye from 1983 to 1985. He is the author of Instant Art History, published in 1995. Robinson is also a practicing painter, who most recently showed his work at Metro Pictures in New York in spring 2008.

WINNER

Jerry Saltz has been senior art critic for New York magazine since 2007. Before that he was senior art critic for the Village Voice from 1998 to 2007. He is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism and the author of two volumes of collected criticism, Seeing Out Loud (2003) and Seeing Out Louder (2009). Saltz was the winner of the 2007 Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism and was named “Best Critic in New York” by Time Out New York in 2006. He has written for Frieze, Art in America, Time Out New York, Parkett, Flash Art, and many other publications. He currently teaches at Columbia University and the School of Visual Arts, both in New York, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.