Eyes on the prize
Now in its seventh year, the Hublot Design Prize has always highlighted innovative young talents – and this year’s winner is no exception, discovers Simon de Burton
Artist and illustrator Mohammed Iman Fayaz has scooped the CHF100,000 (approximately £95,000) Hublot Design Prize during this year’s Frieze Art Fair in London.
Fayaz – who is of Indian and Afghani descent but hails from Brooklyn, New York, and uses the Instagram handle @brohammed – creates images that centre on LGBTQ communities of colour and has seen his work featured in the MOMA magazine, the Brooklyn Museum and on digital billboards around the Big Apple.
Renowned for his loosely executed illustrations of happy, smiling people, Fayaz was selected for the prize from a shortlist of eight finalists drawn from an initial group of 25 entrants, 20 of whom were put forward by this year’s independent jury members and five by the late Pierre Keller prior to his death in 2019.
In order to win the prize, Fayaz exhibited a typical body of work and explained his ethos to the jury in a presentation entitled ‘Independence of expression & cultural diversity and gender’.
It was a longstanding friendship between Hublot chairman Jean-claude Biver and Mr Keller, the former director of Lausanne’s ECAL design school, that led to the instigation of the Hublot Design Prize, which was created to mark the 10th anniversary of the brand’s Big Bang watch in 2015.
The jury – which comprised Salonsatellite furniture show founder Marva Griffin Wilshire; Serpentine Gallery artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist; design critic Alice Rawsthorn and Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, the duo behind 2018 winner Formafantasma – was unanimous in its decision to select Fayaz.
Speaking after this year’s announcement, Hublot CEO Ricardo Guadalupe described Fayaz as “a great guy”, whose work is “interesting, modern and totally connected to today’s world”. Although 2019’s winner Samuel Ross became a Hublot ambassador and created a minimalist sculpture to mark the brand’s 40th anniversary, Fayaz is not expected to play a similar role as he is more an illustrator than a designer. “There is not really a commercial aspect to the Hublot Design Prize,” says Guadalupe. “Its aim is to help the winner with a useful amount of money, provide a platform to increase their exposure and boost their career, so that they might one day rank among the great names in their field.”