Cartier Award Goes to Wilfriedo Prieto

LONDON—Cuban-born, Barcelona-based conceptual artist Wilfredo Prieto has been announced as the winner of this year's Cartier Award, established to help an emerging artist present a work at the Frieze Art Fair. Prieto's proposed work, titled Pond, consists of a site-specific installation of over 100 oil drums; the stillness of the static, water-filled containers is to be broken by a resident live frog. Prieto will receive up to £10,000 ($19,500) in production costs, an artist’s fee of £1,000, and a three-month residency at London’s Gasworks Gallery.

Compared to previous winners Mario Garcia Torres in 2007 and Mika Rottenberg in 2006, Prieto is relatively unknown. He was part of the Latin American pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and he took over a vast exhibition hall at the seventh Havana Biennale in 2006, installing only a single real banana skin atop of a bar of soap. In 2005 he exhibited Untitled (White Library), 6,000 blank books of different sizes, at the De Appel Museum in Amsterdam.