Photographer's images capture award

CRAIGIE HORSFIELD, the British photographer, is among three artists who will be sharing a dollars 100,000 ( pounds 68,000) prize awarded yesterday by the Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation.

The award, one of the world's most valuable, is funded by Coutts International Private Banking. The Swiss-based art foundation was founded in 1992 'to benefit artists in the forefront of development in the visual arts, by making biennial awards'.

Mr Horsfield is an artist who is said to fuse traditions of painting and photography in sensitive, compassionate images. The other winners are the Italian Luciano Fabro, whose Demeter in stone and steel cable reflects his sensuous approach to sculptural materials; and the German Katharina Fritsch, whose provocative work includes Company at Table, a strikingly sinister piece in which characterless, humanoid figures - polyester casts of a real man - are seated along a table, their lines strangely melting into an almost abstract image.

The artists were selected by the foundation's art advisory committee, whose members include Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery. He said that the award was unusual in having an international jury and international winners: 'Many awards and prizes in the arts have been national events.'

Mr Serota added that the Coutts awards are 'remarkable' because they not only give 'recognition for achievement by giving a cash prize, but also provide an opportunity by making available funds for a subsequent exhibition or project'.

Paying tribute to each of the winners, Mr Serota described Mr Fabro as 'a sculptor whose work displays a sensitivity to the traditional materials of sculpture - stone, bronze and marble - but also a willingness to combine these in arresting juxtapositions with new materials'.

Mr Fabro is a well-known name, an artist active for nearly 30 years. The other two recipients are less established. Mr Serota said that Ms Fritsch's sculptures and installations, using everyday objects, 'cause us to question our own relationship to the consumer society and to the modern world'.

Mr Horsfield, he added, has distinguished himself with a moving group of portraits and landscapes taken in Poland in the late 1970s and, more recently, with images of the human body and east London landscapes.

The other distinguished adjudicators were Kasper Konig, head of Stadelschule, State Academy of Fine Arts, Frankfurt am Main; Gary Garrels, chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco; and Hans Ulrich Bodenmann, president of the Joseph Beuys Foundation, Basel.

(Photographs omitted)