FREE ENTRY / Coin Cabinet of Winterthur - Medal competition 2023

Introduction The Swiss Society for Medal Art (Smed'A), founded in January 2023, in collaboration with the Numismatic Museum («Münzkabinett») of the City of Winterthur, announces an art medal competition for plastic artists in Switzerland and abroad. Smed'A is supported by the Swiss representatives of FIDEM (the Association of International Medal Art). The competition is being held as part of the exhibition «THE BIG IN THE SMALL – MEDALS FROM THE RENAISSANCE AND THE PRESENT» in the Numismatic Museum («Münzkabinett») of the City of Winterthur. The competition results will be awarded and presented in the museum on March 3, 2024. From March 23, 2024, an exhibition of the prize-winning works will be held at the Winterthur Museum. Goal The aim of this call for entries is to promote contemporary medal art internationally. The medal of art should be brought closer to people interested in art, but also to artists. The medal of art is still a very unknown medium. It is only the size of a hand and offers the opportunity to take a stand on personal or social issues in a small format. Unlike a sports medal, it does not pursue an honouring purpose, but serves its idea alone: namely the individual artistic statement. Incentives are created by two or more medal sides that allow a topic to be illuminated from different aspects, often supported by the use of texts or quotations. It is also appealing that an art medal only reveals itself when you take it in your hand, turn it over and thereby experience an additional haptic pleasure. With this call for entries, the organisers would like to encourage artists in Switzerland and other countries to engage with this art form. ArtMedals: MEDALS AS INDIVIDUAL CHRONICLES OF THE PRESENT «There is hardly a medium of contemporary art that draws its innovative potential so strongly from the tradition of art history as does the current medal art. A tradition only remains alive by developing it further. Medals can be regarded as an alternative form of historiography that has its origins in the aesthetic thinking of artists. What these small works of art show is a commitment to radical subjectivity in dealing with contemporary history, which can be interpreted as resistance against both the monopoly of the mass media on the interpretation of current world events as well as against the increasingly politically formulated prohibitions on thinking and commemorating... Art medals with literary or poetic texts stand out from the high speed of the digital information flow and open up an aesthetic space in which there is actually something to think about.» Dr. Joachim Penzel, art historian in Halle/Saale, quoted from the book «KUNST IM GRIFF Contemporary Medal Art». German Society for Medal Art, 2022 An art medal is a small, original and sculptural work of art that is usually designed as a onesided or multi-sided relief. Although the reliefs are spatially designed, the object itself is not a three-dimensional small sculpture. Medals are works of art and not artistically designed objects of daily use. They can be made of a wide variety of materials: Metals, ceramics, papers, plastics, collages–there are no limits to the techniques.