Carrie Yamaoka Awarded 2025 Maria Lassnig Prize
134June 21, 2025
TheMaria Lassnig Foundationhas named Japanese American interdisciplinary artist Carrie Yamaoka as the winner of its 2025Maria Lassnig Prize. Established in 2017, the honor is presented biennially in recognition of a midcareer artist and is accompanied by a €50,000 (about $58,000) cash prize. Yamaoka will present a solo exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the institutional partner for this year’s prize; the 2026 show will be her first one-person exhibition at a German institution.
Born in 1957, the New York–based Yamaoka is known for a practice that encompasses painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture. She is particularly interested in flux, and in the distorting of perception. Among the themes explored in Yamaoka’s work are those of materiality, process, transformation, and chance. Her identity, as a queer American artist of Japanese descent, informs her oeuvre too. “Although I do not make work with obvious subject matter, everything about where I come from is embedded in my work,” she toldHyperallergiclast year. “I am a product of a variety of diasporic forces—both westward and eastward.” A founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy, she has exhibited widely at institutions including the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; MoMA PS1, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Centre Pompidou and the Palais de Tokyo, both in Paris.
Yamaoka was selected by a jury comprising Peter Pakesch, chairman of the Maria Lassnig Foundation; Alexander Klar, director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle; Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, London; Matthias Mühling, director of the Lenbachhaus, Munich; artist Rosa Barba; and Brigitte Kölle and Corinne Diserens, each of whom is curator and director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle’s contemporary art collection. Previous winners to date are Lubaina Himid (2023), Atta Kwami (2021), Sheela Gowda (2019), and Cathy Wilkes (2017).