Talente. Masters of the Future Prizes 2023

This year's Talente prize in the field of technology goes to Elisabeth Ott. Her kayak is made of birch plywood. Her goal was to design a wooden boat that was easy on materials and labour. For the curvature, she uses a technique that involves slotting the panel material. This keeps the board connected as a whole and retains its inherent tension. As a special element, the ends of the furrows are designed in teardrop shape.

Talente Prizes Design:

Agnes Kelm brings a new zest to sweeping. She frees functional brooms from any pretence of efficiency and turns them into an object that can serve as a kind of meditation through repetitive motion. The use of her brooms conveys calm in a hectic world. The jury also praised the convincing craftsmanship and pointed out the rarity of this craft.

Philsoo Heo from South Korea has created his sculpture Burn Out, a work about growing and becoming in nature. The sculpture is made of ceramic and represents a pile of burned firewood that can collapse at any time. In addition to the sculptural quality, the jury praised the calm and powerful, concentrated and mysterious monumentality of the work.

Yinglong Li from China lives in the UK. Her vessel object in the highly complicated window enamel technique combines traditional craft with digital technology. Inspired by impressionist painting, he plays with light and a finely nuanced choice of colours.

Matthias Gschwendtner's Log Chair impressed the jury with its combination of high-tech process and individual production. Waste materials from the wood industry are used to produce individual pieces through a multi-stage process. The seating comfort and the basic shape are the same, but in the details, depending on the particular pieces of wood, the individual chairs differ.

The necklace by Susie Heuberger (Mexico / Germany) is made of corn kernels, garnet stones, cotton and poly silk. Shape and material refer to Mexico in many ways. With her works, she alludes to the political, social, and ecological aspects of the country. From an economic point of view, corn as food replaces precious stones. At the same time, Susie Heuberger's use of thread refers to fundamental aspects of jewellery, whose origins and early design lie in work with textile materials.

Haisheng Liu (China / South Korea) has built brooches in the form of cans, which are made of so-called SCOBY leather, a plant-based, decomposable material. The pieces are fascinating both as objects and as jewellery. Haisheng Liu plays with the contrast between the solid form of a metal can and the flexible material of leather substitute, and on a second level with the contrast between an ephemeral material like decomposable leather and the lasting value of the jewellery.

Jeroen van den Bogaert from the Netherlands has created wall hangings whose arrangement refers to the form of the Christian triptych. In terms of content, he deals with the theme of masculinity. The focus is on toxic masculinity, with its focus on violence. Jeroen von den Bogaert emphasizes the ambivalence of rejection and fascination of this conception of masculinity and, at the same time, points out in the combination of contemporary photographs and historical motives how little change and development has taken place with regard to certain patterns of behaviour.