KREMS.- Artist Frenzi Rigling has been named the recipient of the 2026 Lower Austria Recognition Award in the Visual Arts category, honoring a practice that has evolved over decades through painting, drawing, textiles and installation.
Born in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, in 1958, Rigling now lives and works between Obermarkersdorf in Lower Austria and Vienna. Her work often begins with the ordinary: objects, materials and visual details drawn from her immediate surroundings. From these modest starting points, she creates layered installations and artworks that reflect on the rhythms of everyday life, the passage of time and the fragility of human existence.
The award also marks the beginning of a new chapter in Rigling’s relationship with the Lower Austria State Gallery in Krems.
Rather than presenting the retrospective-style solo exhibition originally planned for November 2026 through May 2027, Rigling will develop an entirely new site-specific installation for the museum’s ground floor in 2027. The project is intended to extend her practice into a new spatial and conceptual territory rather than summarize what she has already accomplished.
Rigling previously exhibited at the museum in 2023 with the monographic show Frenzi Rigling. Über Das, which brought together works created over the preceding decade.
For Gerda Ridler, Artistic Director of the Lower Austria State Gallery, the award recognizes an artist whose work combines rigor with a sensitivity to things that can easily escape attention.
“With great perseverance, Frenzi Rigling has developed an unmistakable artistic position,” Ridler said. “Her work combines conceptual clarity with poetic openness, a sensual experience of materials with intellectual precision. It makes visible what is easily overlooked and opens up new perspectives on our perception of the world.”
Nikolaus Kratzer, who is due to become Artistic Director of the Lower Austria State Gallery in 2027, also emphasized Rigling’s ability to uncover significance in the seemingly mundane.
“Frenzi Rigling draws attention to what is extraordinary in the everyday and to the structures that hold our lives together like invisible threads,” he said. Kratzer added that he was looking forward to seeing the artist transform the museum’s ground floor with a work created specifically for the space.
For Rigling, the recognition is significant not only as an acknowledgment of her past work but also because it provides momentum for what comes next.
She said the Lower Austria State Gallery had become especially important to her following her solo exhibition there three years ago. The invitation to develop a new project for the museum, she explained, offers a chance to push her practice forward rather than look back.
“The Recognition Award is therefore not only an acknowledgment of what I have already created, but also support for future artistic processes,” Rigling said.
A longstanding cultural prize
The Lower Austria Culture Awards have been presented annually since 1960 across a range of disciplines, including visual art, architecture, music and adult education. Selected by specialist juries, the awards are intended to reflect the breadth of artistic and cultural production in the region while highlighting the wider significance of the recipients’ work.
The 2026 awards ceremony will take place on October 22 at the Festspielhaus St. Pölten, where the prizes will be presented by Governor Johanna Mikl-Leitner.
Greta Schödl exhibition extended
The change in plans for Rigling’s exhibition will also affect the current program at the Lower Austria State Gallery.
The museum has announced that Greta Schödl. Traces of My Life will remain on view for an additional two months, through January 10, 2027.
Schödl is regarded as an important representative of Visual Poetry. Her first museum exhibition in Austria brings together around 200 works spanning drawing, painting, sculpture, objects and performance photography, offering a broad view of an artistic career developed over several decades.
With Rigling’s new installation now planned for 2027, the museum is shifting from a conventional award exhibition toward a project that will allow the artist to respond directly to the architecture of the gallery and continue developing the concerns that have shaped her work over the years.
