Ali Eyal Wins Hammer Museum’s $100,000 Mohn Award
31Feb. 16, 2026
TheHammer Museumin Los Angeles has announced multidisciplinary artistAli Eyalas the winner of the 2025Mohn Award. The institution presents the laurel every two years, in connection with itsMade in LABiennial. The prize honors underrecognized and emerging artists from the Los Angeles area, whose work the biennial was established to support. Eyal will receive $100,000 and will see a catalogue of his work published following the biennial’s March 1 close.
Born in Iraq in 1994, Eyal lives and works in Los Angeles. Influenced by the US occupation of his home country as well as by Disney movies, his work explores themes of displacement, trauma, and memory.
“The sensory whirl of memory and association, imagination and desire, pain and pleasure that makes up any given moment of existence if you’re paying attention. And Eyal has been paying attention,” wrote Andrew Berardini in a September 2025 issue of Artforum. “What he shares from the soft details and hard hurts are disjointed, fugitive, fragile, heartbreaking, forlorn documents torn loosely from a stolen book of memory and invention.”
“I am thrilled to congratulate Ali Eyal on receiving the Mohn Award,” said Hammer Museum director Zoë Ryan in a statement. “His complex and richly detailed painting is both surreal and deeply personal, and speaks powerfully to the impacts of war, globalism, and the immigrant experience in the US.”
The Hammer Museum announced the winners of two other Made in LA–affiliated prizes as well. Interdisciplinary artist Carl Cheng won the Career Achievement Award, while portraitist Greg Breda won the Public Recognition Award. Each will receive $25,000.