COLOGNE.- American artist Lorna Simpson (*1960, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) will receive the 33rd Wolfgang Hahn Prize in 2027, awarded by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst at the Museum Ludwig. The joint decision was made by the jury, comprising of Naomi Beckwith, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and Artistic Director of documenta 16 and the board of the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst.

The prize includes, as always, the acquisition of a work by the award recipient for the collection of the Museum Ludwig.

Lorna Simpson is regarded as a pioneering American conceptual artist. Her multifaceted body of work will provide, in the jury’s view, an important impetus for the Museum Ludwig’s collection of American art. It will further develop the positions in Pop Art and its use of media-influenced imagery, which Peter and Irene Ludwig acquired early on and in considerable depth. It will also build on the numerous examples of conceptual art in the collection. Additionally, Lorna Simpson’s work can be seen as a bridge to contemporary practices by Diamond Stingily and Carolyn Lazard, whose works entered the museum’s collection through the Junger Ankauf initiative of the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst and which reflect on the self-image of African American women.

Lorna Simpson’s two-part photo-text work ID, created in 1990, featuring rear views of a woman, was previously shown at the Museum Ludwig in 1999 in the group exhibition Art Worlds in Dialogue (Kunstwelten im Dialog). Since the 1980s, the artist has linked the use of common depictions of Black women to questions of identity, ethnicity, gender roles, and historical narratives. Her photographs, paintings, films, collages, and installations depart from socially entrenched role models, racist, and sexist stereotypes. The catalog text from 1999 compares the depiction to “Black Madonnas,” a phenomenon deeply rooted in Cologne since 1675 through the veneration of the Black Madonna in a pilgrimage church near the Museum Ludwig.

Lorna Simpson’s multilayered paintings are created in series featuring portraits and full-length figures. Her depictions serve as a mirror of American history. A series of paintings begun in 2019 depicts icebergs against blue or grey backgrounds. These illusionistic scenes evoke a sense of transience in light of global warming. Simpson combines the icy landscapes with visual and textual archival excerpts from the lifestyle magazine “Ebony”, founded in 1945, which is aimed at an African American readership and continues to this day to document the evolution of narratives about self and external perceptions. Whether real or imagined, for Lorna Simpson, these Arctic scenes also serve as a reflection of the mood and increasingly inhospitable conditions in our society.

Lorna Simpson studied photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and earned her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from the University of California, San Diego, in 1985. Her works have been exhibited in major museums worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA in New York. In Germany, she gained wider recognition through a major solo exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich (2013–14). Her works are currently exhibited (through November 22, 2026) at the Punta della Dogana in Venice.

The Wolfgang Hahn Prize is awarded annually by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst at the Museum Ludwig, and will be presented for the 33rd time in 2027. The award is primarily intended to honor contemporary artists who have already made a name for themselves in the art world with an internationally recognized oeuvre, but who are not yet as well known in Germany as they deserve to be. The prize money, which amounts to a maximum of 100,000 euros, is made up of contributions from members and is used to purchase a work or group of works for the Museum Ludwig collection. The prize is accompanied by exhibitions of the acquired work(s) organized by the Museum Ludwig and a publication.

The name of the prize honours the memory of the passionate Cologne collector and painting restorer Wolfgang Hahn (1924–1987), who was committed to European and American avant-garde art in Cologne in many ways. The Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst feels indebted to his exemplary work as a collector, as its founding member and as head of the restoration workshops at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and the Museum Ludwig.