Contemporary
Talents
competition

Reflecting current contemporary creation, the Talents Contemporains competition, launched 12 years ago, explores the European and international art scenes on the special theme of water. As a result, a highly original collection has been built up, featuring artists who have graduated from renowned art schools as well as atypical self-taught artists.

Today, some 80 works form a singular body of work that runs counter to certain institutional trends, exhibited both in the art center and increasingly on tour in different regions.

For the winning artists, the endowment is not only a real financial boost, but also a springboard for their careers, with institutional recognition, a range of communication tools and a chance to share their work with the public.

Each year, up to 1,000 artists from around 100 countries submit their applications. After selection of around thirty finalists by four expert committees, the Grand Jury, chaired by Jean-Noël Jeanneney, chooses a maximum of seven winners.
The annual prize is €160,000. The four prizewinners each receive 15,000 euros for the acquisition of their work. A further 50,000 euros is earmarked for the production of works presented in the form of projects. The “Talents Contemporains” competition gives rise to the acquisition of the work, a group exhibition at the Foundation’s art center, a bilingual edition and a video presenting the work of the winners.

→ Take part in the contest

The theme of water takes on a special meaning in the Fondation’s art center. It is housed in the former Wattwiller springs bottling plant. Water is thus omnipresent, both in the works exhibited and in the architecture of the art center itself. It was on this very subject of water that the “Talents Contemporains” competition was launched by the François Schneider Foundation in 2011, rewarding artists for a work examining the many contours of the aquatic element.

Water has always nourished the founding myths of different civilizations and major religions, and governed relations between people. In popular belief and collective memory, a spring or a river takes on different symbolic meanings, often presenting water as ambivalent: gentle or evil, purifying or deadly, luminous or dark.

From Greek antiquity to Amerindian cultures, water conveys every possible metaphor, and many writers and creators draw inspiration from it. From the Odyssey in Ancient Greece to the Classic of Mountains and Seas in China, through tales and legends from all horizons, timeless works such as Melville’s Moby Dick or Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, as well as very contemporary authors, from Édouard Limonov (Le Livre de l’eau) to Atiq Rahimi (Les Porteurs d’eau), or, not to mention Gaston Bachelard (L’Eau et les Rêves. Essai sur l’imagination de la matière), each deploys a palette of words and representations of unprecedented richness, testifying to the abundance of possible illustrations and the subject itself.

Water is infinite and unfathomable, and its multiplicity has prompted many contemporary visual artists to inventory and illustrate its abundant characteristics. Migratory issues, ecological concerns, scientific interrogations and geographical experiments have given rise to a variety of works introducing water in all its forms.