The award, announced by the Centre Pompidou Museum of Modern Art in Paris, was given to Jiří Valoch and his exceptional contribution to the use of text in intermedia art practice.
Valoch is a visual, photographic and conceptual artist who uses poetry as a fundamental element of his work. Since the 1960s, he has worked in visual poetry, drawing, artist’s books, photography and performance. He was equally involved in curatorial activities and theory – in 1968, for example, he prepared the first exhibition of computer art in the Eastern Bloc, Computer Graphic, and maintained contacts with theorists and artists around the world, including, for example, the Fluxus movement or participated in the New Tendencies in Zagreb.
The Le Prix d’honneur Bernard Heidsieck-Centre Pompidou has a unique position among other literary prizes in its focus on authors whose work goes beyond the standard book forms of literature and extends, for example, into the fields of sound and visual poetry, performance, and digital literature.