The Nobel Prize Awards were concluded with the announcement of the winner in the Economic Sciences. It was a week-long series of awards across six different categories- Economics, Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature, and Peace Prize. Along with the names of the prize winners in these categories, one name also steels the limelight through his widely appreciated artwork. It is none other than Niklas Elmehed- the man behind the beautiful gold-leaf illustrations of each of the prize winners.
Niklas Elmehed enjoys the privilege of being acquainted with the identities of Nobel laureates before the announcement. His gold-embellished illustrations of Nobel Prize recipients graces news stories, publications, magazines, and social media posts every year, since 2012. Each October, the Nobel Prize organisation announces the names of Nobel Prize winners, and the illustrations created by Niklas are the first official images of the laureates.
Who Is Niklas Elmehed?
Niklas Elmehed is a Sweden-based artist who started working for Nobel Prize media in 2012 as an art director, before switching over to freelance several years later. He has been in charge of creating the portraits from the very start. Prior to 2012, the media and images used alongside the laureates were assembled somewhat haphazardly, often relying on whatever pictures could be sourced from the internet.
The idea behind the illustrations stemmed from the fact that it was difficult to get the pictures of scientists. In an interview with 'Popular Science' in 2019, Elmehed said, "Many of the science laureates are pretty hard to get pictures. If you search for a photo, it’s a highly pixelated, low-res image on a webpage somewhere in the world. You just find their face on the staff members page, taken with a lousy camera."
Obviously, Elhemed couldn’t just ask the winner for a better image as that would ruin the surprise. So, at first, "the idea was just to make a drawing of the missing laureates." But after the first year, Nobel Media realized that the paintings looked much better and had uniformity in them and asked Elmehed was asked to paint all of the winners.
Nobel Prize Winners List 2023:
Talking about this year's winners, the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, officially known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize, was awarded to Harvard professor Claudia Goldin, while the Nobel Prize in Medicine was jointly awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman.
Talking about the Nobel Prize in Physics and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, they were awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, Anne L’Huillier and Moungi G Bawendi, Louis E Brus, Alexei I Ekimov respectively.
Coming to litetrature, Norwegian author Jon Fosse received the Nobel Prize in Literature and lastly, Nobel Peace Prize for 2023 was awarded to Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi.