ZURICH.- The Roswitha Haftmann Foundation announced that the artist Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) is awarded with Europe’s best-endowed art award—the Roswitha Haftmann Prize.
The prize, installed according to the will of the late Swiss gallerist Roswitha Haftmann (1924–98) honours the lifetime achievements of exceptional artists. Wolfgang Tillmans is its 28th recipient. The Prize will be handed over to him during an award ceremony on September 17 at the Kunsthaus Zürich. Previous winners have included Walter De Maria, Maria Lassnig, Robert Ryman, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Sigmar Polke, Pierre Huyghe, Trisha Brown, Lawrence Weiner, Cecilia Vicuña, Gülsün Karamustafa, VALIE EXPORT and Cildo Meireles. The Prize is unique in that it imposes no additional conditions and allows its recipients to freely use the generous prize money (CHF 150’000) as they see fit, for example to fund new artistic activities or document and preserve their inventory or workshop.
The winner of the Roswitha Haftmann Prize is chosen by the Foundation Board, whose members include, according to statutes, the directors of the Kunstmuseum Bern (Dr Nina Zimmer), the Kunstmuseum Basel (Elena Filipovic) and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (Dr Yilmaz Dziewior) and is chaired by the Director of the Kunsthaus Zürich (Ann Demeester). Further members are co-opted, including Karola Kraus (former Director of the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien), Prof. Bernhart Schwenk (Curator of Contemporary Art at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich), who will deliver the laudation for this year’s award recipient, and the journalist and art critic Prof. Thomas Wagner.
‘Wolfgang Tillmans is unquestionably one of the trailblazing artists of his generation in the field of photography internationally. His artistic practice goes far beyond the purely aesthetic, harnessing public presence and language to foster a collective democratic consciousness founded on openness and solidarity’, says Bernhart Schwenk, member of the Board of the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation.
From documenter of subculture to creator of a political image consciousness
Wolfgang Tillmans came to prominence in the 1990s with his seminal portraits of people from his immediate circle, the European club scene and the LGBTIQ+ community. His photographs were published in music and lifestyle magazines and quickly established him as a meticulous documenter of social trends. In the decades that followed, he broadened his activities to encompass still lifes, sky and landscape photographs, astronomical images and new photographic practices in which the camera was replaced by the interplay of mechanical operations or the mineral and chemical processes of photography. The material aspects of the image—paper, surface, printing and form of presentation—also became central to his work. Tillmans’s oeuvre combines aesthetic sensibility with a political interest in constructions of reality and claims to truth, especially as they relate to ideologies and gender issues.
Pioneer of a variable, installational photographic art
Wolfgang Tillmans places his images in a vast array of constellations and contexts; he plays with visual conventions—in newspapers and magazines, exhibition catalogues and other artists’ publications, but most often in typically large-format installations on museum walls or on tables, in which he arranges photocopies, photographs and magazine articles, postcards, packaging and other materials he has collected beneath glass plates. Although Tillmans’s artistic medium is photography, his practice involves much more than simply taking photographs. Tillmans is interested in the materiality of his images as objects and in the impact of architectural spaces. When first deployed, that multifaceted, often installational approach to photography was entirely new; Tillmans was a pioneer of photography as an art form and, to this day, he exerts a powerful influence on upcoming generations of artists. Beyond photography and installations, Tillmans’s practice has expanded, especially over recent years, to include sound and video works, collaborative music productions and works with text.
Art and social responsibility
For Wolfgang Tillmans, art is closely bound up with social commitment. Above and beyond his unmistakeable photographic work, he speaks out in favour of an open and democratic Europe, launching an anti-Brexit campaign on his own initiative in 2016, as well as campaigns urging people to vote in the German Federal Parliament elections in 2017 and the European elections in 2019 and 2024.
Tillmans views culture as a vital space for dialogue, empathy and shared values. His commitment, now also articulated via the Between Bridges foundation, which he set up in 2017, and a multiplicity of projects supported, reflects a quiet but determined form of moral courage: a willingness to defend freedoms, challenge indifference and encourage participation in democratic life.
Exhibitions and awards
Wolfgang Tillmans’s work has been widely exhibited and garnered numerous awards over the past decades. His exhibition ‘To Look Without Fear’ was shown at MoMA/The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2022, before moving in 2023 to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2025, he presented Weltraum at the Albertinum in Dresden, and in the same year Rien ne nous y préparait–Tout nous y préparait / Nothing could have prepared us—Everything could have prepared us at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2000, he became the first photographic artist and the first non-British recipient of the prestigious Turner Prize; this was followed in 2018 by the Goslarer Kaiserring. Now, in 2026, he receives the Prize awarded by the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation, Zurich.
