DUSSELDORF.- With the K21 Global Art Award, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen presents the most generously endowed annual prize for younger international contemporary art in Germany. Returning for its fourth edition on October 8, 2026, the award is presented in partnership with the Friends of Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen and with the support of the Reydan + Roger Weiss Foundation.
The €100,000 award recognizes artists in the mid of their career whose distinctive visions and practices are shaping contemporary art today. Through an acquisition for the collection and a presentation at K21, the award also contributes to the ongoing broadening of Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen’s collection, bringing diverse artistic perspectives and practices into its galleries.
The 2026 nominees are Monira Al Qadiri, biarritzzz, Julia Phillips, Mohammed Z. Rahman, Juliana dos Santos, WangShui, Wong Ping, and Cici Wu. Artist Julia Phillips is the recipient of the 2026 K21 Global Art Award.
Susanne Gaensheimer, Director of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen: “I am delighted that, thanks to the generous financial support of the Friends of Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen and a private donor, we are able to present the K21 Global Art Award for the fourth time. As one of the most highly endowed international prizes for contemporary art, and with its distinctly global approach, the K21 Global Art Award holds a unique place within Germany’s contemporary art scene. At the same time, the award enables us to strengthen the collection with diverse and internationally significant artistic voices, ensuring that a broad range of contemporary perspectives and experiences are represented in the museum. I warmly congratulate Julia Phillips on receiving the K21 Global Art Award 2026.”
The K21 Global Art Award contributes to the programmatic expansion of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen’s collection, helping to make it more diverse and global. Linked to a significant new acquisition for the collection, the award is endowed with 100,000 euros. This art award also symbolizes the Friends’ creative and sustainable commitment to the museum. The acquired work will be given to the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen by the Friends on permanent loan.
Following the award’s previous laureates—the South African artist Senzeni Marasela in 2023, who was also a participant in the 2026 Venice Biennale; Chinese video artist Wang Tuo in 2024; and in 2025 Brazilian artist Tadáskía, recipient of TIME100 NEXT 2025—the K21 Global Art Award proudly announces Julia Phillips (b. 1985 in Hamburg, lives and works in Chicago) as its 2026 winner.
Reflecting about the award, Julia Phillips says: “Receiving the K21 Global Art Award is a very significant milestone for me: K21 becomes the first German institution and German collection in general that is acquiring my sculptural work. I am delighted to gain recognition in my home country. The work Oppressor with Soul, In Treatment & Suppressor with Spirit, In Treatment (2020) marks a turning point in my practice in many ways. The installation features imaginary organs that later become part of my oeuvre; it also portrays an interaction: not between multiple bodies, but between bodies in relationship to institutions and larger forces. With its metaphysical dimension, the work is a challenging piece to describe and hopefully presents as challenging of an encounter to the viewer.”
The Winner
Alongside works on paper and videos, Julia Phillips (b. 1985 in Hamburg) works primarily with ceramics and metal, creating sculptures reminiscent of functional objects. Her works are metaphors for social and psychological experiences, metaphors that are both mechanical and bodily, and that typically focus on experiences of power relations between individuals or between an individual and an institution.
Recently, Phillips has turned her focus towards the inside of the body, portraying organs and growths as well as references to the medical environment to challenge perceptions of subject-object relationships within the care industry.
As part of the K21 Global Art Award, Julia Phillips’s significant and compelling installation Oppressor with Soul, In Treatment & Suppressor with Spirit, In Treatment (2020) enters the collection of Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.
Drawing on her engagement with different forms and structures of power—from postcolonial histories and their ongoing legacies of domination to personal and psychological dynamics—Phillips explores how oppressive forces become inscribed in the body and shape our sense of self.
Two partial casts of the shoulders, neck, and head are mounted on stainless-steel tension poles held between the floor and ceiling, leaving the bodies suspended in space. Their ears appear ruptured under the pressure of forces that are both external and internal.
The head of Oppressor is angled sharply downward, as if gazing condescendingly at an unseen counterpart or physically pressed down, while Suppressor appears to avert its gaze upward, intentionally beyond what is right in front. Their postures become expressions of power and submission on the one hand, and self-suppression and avoidance on the other.
Phillips juxtaposes these bodily forms with two ceramic sculptures that imagine possible manifestations of the soul and spirit. Soul and Spirit rest in spun-metal displays reminiscent of medical bowls used to hold surgical instruments.
These inner, immaterial dimensions of the human being are likewise not presented as intact: both forms bear traces of injury, pain, and repair. The work asks how structures of power and oppression operate not only through social and historical relations, but also through the body—becoming embodied and internalized, and reflected in the ways we perceive ourselves and others.
Julia Phillips was born in Hamburg and lives and works in Chicago. She has had solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1 in New York, Kunstverein Braunschweig, and the Barbican Arts Centre, London. She was featured in the Berlin Biennial, the New Museum Triennial, the Venice Biennale, and the Whitney Biennial.
Her work has been shown at museums including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Her work is held in numerous public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt a. M., the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art New York.
Julia Phillips recently completed her first public artwork commission titled Observer, Observed for the NY High Line, which was shown in second iteration at the Sydney Festival 2026, and published her first monograph titled Energy Exchange with Mousse Publishing, Milan.
Selection Process for the K21 Global Art Award 2026
The nomination jury for this year’s award once again consisted of four internationally renowned museum directors and curators: Naomi Beckwith (documenta 16, Kassel, Germany; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, New York, US), Doryun Chong (M+, Hong Kong), Omar Kholeif (Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE), and Jochen Volz (Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil). Each jury member nominated up to two artists.
The nominees for the K21 Global Art Award 2026 are:
• Monira Al Qadiri (b. 1983 in Dakar, Senegal; Kuwaiti citizen; lives in Berlin, Germany)
• biarritzzz (b. 1994 in Fortaleza, Brazil; lives in Salvador, Brazil)
• Julia Phillips (b. 1985 in Hamburg, Germany; lives in Chicago, USA)
• Mohammed Z. Rahman (b. 1997 in London, UK; lives in London, UK)
• Juliana dos Santos (b. 1987 in São Paulo, Brazil; lives in São Paulo, Brazil)
• WangShui (b. 1986 in Dallas, TX, USA; lives in New York, USA)
• Wong Ping (b. 1984 in Hong Kong; lives in Hong Kong)
• Cici Wu (b. in Beijing, China; grown up in Hong Kong; lives in New York, USA)
This shortlist was submitted to the selection committee of the K21 Global Art Award, which appointed the winner.
The 2026 selection committee consisted of Beatrice Hilke (Curator, Haus am Waldsee), Susanne Gaensheimer (Director, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen), Leopold Freiherr von Diergardt (Chairman of the Friends of K20 K21), as well as two young members of the Friends of K20 K21, Jonas Görges (collector, Düsseldorf) and Katharina Neudeck (specialist in modern and contemporary art, Kunsthaus Lempertz).
Leopold Freiherr von Diergardt (Chairman of the Friends of K20 K21) acknowledges: “With the K21 Global Art Award, we as Friends of Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen would like to contribute to the continued development of the collection. It is particularly important to us to bring new artistic perspectives from different parts of the world into focus and to establish them permanently within the museum. In just a few years, the K21 Global Art Award has become an important international platform for recognizing outstanding artistic practices. We are especially proud and delighted to be able to acquire Julia Phillips’s compelling installation Oppressor with Soul, In Treatment & Suppressor with Spirit, In Treatment for the collection. This acquisition has been made possible through our Stiftung junge Kunst and the generous support of the Reydan + Roger Weiss Foundation. As with all acquisitions made by the Friends, the award-winning work will become part of the permanent collection as a long-term loan.”
