Anna Boghiguian Wins 2024 Wolfgang Hahn Prize

Egyptian Canadian artist Anna Boghiguian has been announced as the winner of the thirtieth Wolfgang Hahn Prize, to be presented at a ceremony taking place during the Art Cologne art fair in November of next year. Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, the prize’s sponsor, will acquire a work by Boghiguian for its collection, providing her with €100,000 (about $105,000) in exchange. She will additionally receive a solo exhibition at the institution in the autumn of 2024; the show will be accompanied by a catalogue.

Born in 1946 in Cairo, Boghiguian, who is of Armenian descent, has gained wide renown for her paintings, drawings, and installations investigating histories of oppression and inequality as shaped by forces including global commerce, slavery, colonialism, and war. Among the topics she has touched on are the respective histories of the cotton and salt trades and the life of Egyptian Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy.

In 2015, Boghiguian was one of a group of artists to represent Armenia at the fifty-sixth Venice Biennale, where the Adelina von Fürstenberg-curated group show “Armenity: Contemporary Artists from the Armenian Diaspora” was awarded Best National Pavilion. Her work appeared in the 2009 and 2015 iterations of the Istanbul Biennial, the 2011 Sharjah Biennial, and Documenta 13, which took place in 2012.RelatedHELEN FRANKENTHALER FOUNDATION SUED FOR “DESTROYING” PAINTER’S LEGACYBMA CREATES PAID INTERNSHIPS HONORING VALERIE MAYNARD “I am extremely pleased that Anna Boghiguian will receive the Wolfgang Hahn Prize 2024,” said Museum Ludwig director Yilmaz Dziewior in a statement. “With her, an artist is honored whose work is equally political and poetic.” Guest juror Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who curated the iterations of Documenta and the Istanbul Biennial in which Boghiguian’s work featured, in a statement lauded the “poetry and uniqueness” of the artist’s work noting that “her directness and expressivity fit ideally into the Museum Ludwig’s collection with its strong expressionist positions.

Anna Boghiguian has been widely recognized internationally only recently, over the last ten years,” Christov-Bakargiev continued, “so . . .

this award is for a highly topical artist, rather than for a lifetime achievement.” Previous winners of the prize include Francis Alÿs, Frank Bowling, Trisha Donnelly, Mike Kelley, Kerry James Marshall, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, and Haegue Yang..