Apollo Awards 2024: Artist of the Year

Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford may be an abstract painter, but his ability to represent violence and threat while steering clear of figuration gives his canvases a distinctly troubling quality. ‘Keep Walking’, his first ever solo exhibition in Germany, may be the best way in years to get the measure of his forceful painting style. Bringing together 20 carefully curated works spanning some 20 years, it conveys Bradford’s acute sense of the fragility of bodies, especially Black bodies.

Mark Bradford at the opening of his exhibition ‘Ágora’ at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, in November 2021. Photo: Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP via Getty Images

Christoph Büchel

This year, Christoph Büchel undertook his largest work to date, for the Fondazione Prada in Venice. Not content with exploring value by translating his own DNA into diamonds, he took on the entire financial system we live through. The craftsmanship was mesmerising – his recreations of flea markets, food banks, Bitcoin mines and Instagram influencers’ studios were displays of wit, beauty and flair. This was highly conceptual political art, which rewarded not just the thinking but also the looking.

Installation view of ‘Monte de Pietà’ by Christoph Büchel at the Fondazione Prada, Venice, in 2024. Photo: Marco Cappelletti; courtesy Fondazione Prada

Sophie Calle

When the Musée Picasso announced that it would be hosting an exhibition by Sophie Calle, it was hard to imagine how this most personal of artists might react to the venue. Her response was to revisit her themes of concealment, her word games, her cat Souris and her biography. Without erasing the greatness of Picasso, Calle made a case for countering his overbearing presence in art history through an alternative vision of what art could be.

Sophie Calle at her exhibition ‘À toi de faire, ma mignonne’ at the Musée National Picasso, Paris, in September 2023. Photo: Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images

Andrew Cranston

Andrew Cranston has been working in Glasgow with singular determination. His painted book covers and narrative canvases with poetic titles seem to have found a wider audience after his first institutional show, ‘Andrew Cranston: What Made You Stop Here?’ at Hepworth Wakefield, which opened in November 2023. As well as this full-scale retrospective, he has had commercial exhibitions in Edinburgh, New York and Paris. Finally, this idiosyncratic painter is getting the attention he deserves.

Andrew Cranston at his studio in Glasgow in September 2023. Photo: Matthew Arthur Williams

Jeffrey Gibson

The work of Jeffrey Gibson took over the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year and proved the brightest in the Giardini. Presented as something of a Gesamtkunstwerk, it channelled the themes Gibson frequently explores – queer and Indigenous histories, rival cultures, the oppressiveness of legislature – into a celebration of colour and form, culminating in a riotous, thumping film that confirmed his status as one of the most important voices in American art.

Jeffrey Gibson at the opening of ‘The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans’ at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in September 2023. Photo: Shannon Finney/Getty Images

Roni Horn

No fewer than four Roni Horn shows opened around the world this year. Two exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth demonstrated her mastery of a variety of media, while a show at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, paired her work with clips from classic movies. But it was the major survey of her oeuvre at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne that best encapsulated her endless curiosity and abiding interest in the nature of representation.