The Maria Lassnig Foundation has announced New York-based artist Carrie Yamaoka as the recipient of its 2025 prize, a distinction awarded biennially to a mid-career artist whose work deserves wider international recognition. The award includes a major institutional exhibition—Yamaoka’s first solo museum presentation in Germany—opening at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in the summer of 2026.
Initiated by Maria Lassnig herself, the prize reflects the late artist’s enduring commitment to her peers. Lassnig, whose uncompromising practice gained global acclaim only later in life, envisioned a platform for artists working outside the spotlight—those pushing boundaries without immediate validation from the market or institutions. Since its founding, the prize has highlighted singular voices, such as Cathy Wilkes, Sheela Gowda, Atta Kwami, and Lubaina Himid.
Yamaoka’s work resists easy categorisation. Spanning painting, sculpture, photography, and drawing, her practice explores the instability of surfaces and materials, pushing the limits of what can be seen, felt, or recorded. Reflective resins, altered emulsions, reworked prints: her objects hover between states, resisting finality and playing with the act of looking. The artist has, on occasion, returned to older works decades later to remake or undo them, fracturing linear ideas of authorship and time.
Born in Glen Cove, NY, in 1957 and shaped by a hybrid heritage of Japanese and Anglo-American lineage, Yamaoka spent formative years living in Japan before settling in New York. She co-founded the influential queer art collective fierce pussy in 1991, which emerged during the AIDS crisis with an urgent, activist-driven aesthetic that continues today. Her early text-based works—created with typewriter correction ribbons—explored erasure and recovery, utilising the materials of silence to address the politics of visibility.
Yamaoka’s upcoming exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle marks a significant moment, both for her career and for the German institution, which will also host a major Maria Lassnig–Edvard Munch pairing earlier in the year. The dual programming underscores Lassnig’s deep connection to the museum, which began collecting her work in the early 1980s.
The jury behind this year’s selection included Peter Pakesch (Chairman of the Maria Lassnig Foundation), Alexander Klar (Director, Hamburger Kunsthalle), Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matthias Mühling, Rosa Barba, and Kunsthalle curators Brigitte Kölle and Corinne Diserens.
Yamaoka’s work has been exhibited internationally for over four decades. Highlights include shows at the Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, MoMA PS1, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and Mass MoCA. Her work is held in collections including the Whitney Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Buffalo AKG, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. She is represented by the Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles), Kiang Malingue (Hong Kong and New York), and Ulterior (New York).
A new monograph, RE: Carrie Yamaoka, will be published by Radius Books in July 2025, coinciding with her solo exhibition See-Saw at Anonymous Gallery, New York.
Top Photo: Carrie Yamaoka, self-portrait. Courtesy of the artist
Past Winners
2025 Carrie Yamaoka
2023 Lubaina Himid
2021 Atta Kwami
2019 Sheela Gowda
2017 Cathy Wilkes