DUSSELDORF.- The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, in cooperation with the Friends of the Kunstsammlung and with generous financial support from the Reydan + Roger Weiss Foundation, is presenting the K21 Global Art Award for the third time. This award is unique in its global approach and is one of the most highly endowed art prizes in Germany. The nominated artists were proposed by an international jury consisting of Doryun Chong, Koyo Kouoh, Omar Kholeif, and Jochen Volz. The 2025 nominees are Sin Wai Kin, Simon Fujiwara, Hashel Al Lamki, Celia Hempton, Sallisa Rosa, and Tadáskía. The museum is delighted to announce that the winner of the 2025 K21 Global Art Award is the Brazilian artist Tadáskía. The award ceremony will take place on October 9 at K21.
Susanne Gaensheimer, Director of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen: “I am delighted that, thanks to the generous financial support of the Friends of the Kunstsammlung and a private donor, we are able to present this important and highly endowed prize again this year. As director of the museum, it is very important to me to expand the museum’s canonical collection with young, diverse, and international positions. I would like to congratulate the winner of this year’s K21 Global Art Award, Tadáskía, and I look forward to meeting the artist here in Düsseldorf this autumn. I deeply regret that, with the untimely and surprising death of Koyo Kouoh, we have lost an important voice on the K21 Global Art Award nomination jury and a valuable colleague.”
The K21 Global Art Award contributes to the programmatic expansion of the Kunst- sammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen’s collection, helping to make it more diverse and global. Linked to a significant new acquisition for the collection, the award is endowed with 100,000 euros. This art prize also symbolizes the Friends’ creative and sustainable commitment to the museum. The acquired work will be given to the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen by the Friends on permanent loan.
Following the awarding of the prize to the South African artist Senzeni Mthwakazi Marasela in 2023 and the Chinese video artist Wang Tuo in 2024, the Brazilian artist
Tadáskía was chosen as the 2025 recipient. She was nominated by Jochen Volz, director of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. “Tadáskía creates paintings, drawings, and sculptures inspired by mythical narratives of transformation that also reflect her life experiences as a Black trans woman. Organic forms, abstract elements, and the motif of infinity are characteristic of her work, which deals with cycles and constant change in nature. Tadáskía’s work is characterized by freshness and courage,” Volz explains his nomination.
Tadáskía (b. in 1993, Rio de Janeiro) is among the most influential contemporary artists in Brazil today. Her multifaceted practice spans drawing, painting, sculpture, video, and apparitions, delving into themes of transformation, self-perception, familiarity, and strangeness, as well as the living narratives of Afro-Transgender cosmologies.
As part of the K21 Global Art Award, the Friends of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein- Westfalen have acquired her site-specific installation brincando animada: travesti mariposa centopeia / animated play: travesti moth centipede (2025). The work unfolds across the wall in a freely painted semi-abstract composition, accompanied by newly created sculptures made from taboa. “It is a mysterious gift to see my work born around my mother Elenice, speaking to the plants and the stars, and my father Aguinaldo, who taught me to work with constancy—reaching places beyond my familiarity. I am deeply grateful and honored to receive the recognition of the 3rd K21 Global Art Award. I am so excited to see my drawings playing and coming to life in this other part of the world,” says Tadáskía.
Drawing lies at the heart of Tadáskía’s practice. Traces of pastel, spray, graphite, and charcoal become vivid and mysterious signs—each mark an intimate gesture, a whisper from a world between worlds. Her sculptures, crafted from taboa, a reed-like plant traditionally used by Afro-Indigenous communities of Latin America, echo ancestral knowledge through their tactile forms. With this straw-like material, Tadáskía shapes small, twisting sculptures that ripple across the space like arrangements or living creatures, expanding the wall drawing into a kaleidoscopic field of motion and presence. The work weaves together self-perception, imagination, and secrecy, inviting us to question fixed roles and inherited norms—particularly those surrounding gender and visibility.
The acquired work has been exhibited in major international institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2024) and the 35th Bienal de São Paulo (2023). Tadáskía’s works are held in prestigious public collections such as The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, the Pinacoteca São Paulo, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and Kadist in Paris. As of 2025, her work brings a vital contemporary voice from Latin America into the collection of the Kunst- sammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.
