20 May 2022

The 2022 Käthe Kollwitz Prize of the Akademie der Künste goes to Nan Goldin

Award ceremony and exhibition in 2023

The US photographer and filmmaker Nan Goldin is receiving the Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2022. In awarding the prize, the jury comprising Akademie members Hubertus von Amelunxen, Luc Tuymans and Corinne Wasmuht pays tribute to an artist who occupies a central position in contemporary photography and has broken taboos and broken new ground with her photographs of her personal life and those around her and of the LGBT community, thus advocating for acceptance and the growing recognition of the LGBT scene. The immediacy of her photographs stems from her physical and emotional allegiance and proximity to a milieu that has been closed to many people and opened up by her as an artist.

The Akademie der Künste is awarding the prize to Goldin at the beginning of next year. The exhibition in celebration of the award will be staged at the Akademie der Künste at Hanseatenweg from January to March 2023.

Goldin works and conceives her images in rhythmic sequences produced as photographs, slide shows of up to thousands of images, and films. Her interest is in the cumulative nature of her work compositions, their extension, modification and the mutual relationships between them. Moving images, sound and archive material are also integrated into her slide and film productions and, like cinema films, are finally given a musical treatment, which accounts for an essential part of her artistic work.

One of her best-known and iconic works of the last 40 years is the installation The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), conceived as a slide-sound show and loosely based on a song by Kurt Weill from Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera (1928). In this, Goldin shows and honours her New York community of friends and lovers, many of whom she lost to AIDS in the 1980s and years thereafter.

Nan Goldin, born in 1953 in Washington, D.C., lives and works in New York. In 1991, she came to Berlin at the invitation of the DAAD and lived there for four years. Goldin's work can be found in many collections worldwide. Her works have recently been on show at the following institutions, among others:Tate Modern, London (2019); Château de Versailles, France (2018); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2017); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2016). She has been commended with numerous awards, including the Centenary Medal of the Royal Photographic Society, London (2018), the Hasselblad Award (2007) and as a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in France (2006). In 2017, Goldin founded the P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) activist group.

The Käthe Kollwitz Prize endowed with EUR 12,000 has been awarded annually to visual artists since 1960. Recent laureates include Maria Eichhorn (2021), Timm Ulrichs (2020), Hito Steyerl (2019), Adrian Piper (2018) and Katharina Sieverding (2017).

The prize, exhibition and catalogue have been co-financed for 30 years by the Kreissparkasse Köln, sponsor of the Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln.

Further information on the prize: www.adk.de/kaethe-kollwitz-preis