Julia Phillips Wins K21 Award With 2020 Installation

Hamburg-born, Chicago-based artist Julia Phillips has won the 2026 K21 Global Art Award, bringing her 2020 ceramic-and-steel installation Oppressor with Soul, In Treatment & Suppressor with Spirit, In Treatment into the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen’s program. The €100,000 figure is an acquisition budget, not a disclosed cash payout: the Friends of K20 K21 acquire the work and place it with the museum on permanent loan.

 
 

What Julia Phillips’s K21 Award Actually Buys

The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen named Phillips the fourth K21 Global Art Award laureate on September 22, 2026. Its winner page identifies the selected work as a 2020 installation made from ceramic, stainless steel, and nylon hardware. The award ceremony and artist talk are scheduled for October 8 at K21 in Düsseldorf; the presentation opens October 9 and is listed through August 29, 2027.

Those dates separate the decision from the event. Phillips has already won, but the ceremony and public display remain ahead. The official winner page currently uses a detail from the installation’s 2020 presentation.

The money is more specific than many prize headlines suggest. The Friends of the Kunstsammlung describe the K21 award as a €100,000 “Ankaufspreis,” or acquisition award. The award’s published structure says the Friends acquire the selected work and transfer it to the Kunstsammlung as a permanent loan. A 2024 release for winner Wang Tuo further said that year’s €100,000 acquisition budget covered transport, travel, and taxes. The 2026 materials do not publish Phillips’s purchase price, personal payment, or cost breakdown, so €100,000 should not be reported as a check handed directly to the artist.

This makes the award a recurring collection-building instrument for K21’s contemporary art program, rather than an honor detached from a work. An international nomination jury proposes as many as two artists each, and a separate selection committee chooses from the shortlist. Phillips was one of eight 2026 nominees.

 

K21 Ständehaus in Düsseldorf, the venue for Julia Phillips’s 2026 award presentation. Photograph by Fred Romero via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0; cropped.

 
 

Inside the 2020 Installation K21 Selected

Oppressor with Soul, In Treatment & Suppressor with Spirit, In Treatment was shown in Phillips’s New Album exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York in 2020. The gallery lists its dimensions as variable, an important practical point for a work that will be configured in a new room in Düsseldorf.

The title names two agents—an oppressor and a suppressor—but places both “in treatment.” In a 2021 ArtReview assessment, Rachel Remick described a symmetrical arrangement of bodily fragments: molds of shoulders and the base of a skull on vertical supports, along with hollow shoulder forms resembling chest cavities on metal tables. One cavity appears comparatively intact; the other curls into flame-like ceramic forms.

Phillips has supplied a more precise clue to the interior forms. In an artist statement published by the Museum of Arts and Design, she said the installation attempts to give form to “imaginary organs.” The phrase shifts the work away from anatomical illustration. Ceramic behaves like vulnerable tissue, while the steel supports resemble functional or clinical equipment; the bodies implied by the molds remain absent.

That absence is central to the work’s reach. K21 characterizes Phillips’s practice as an investigation of power between people and between a person and an institution, with more recent works extending into the medical and care industries. This installation does not identify a single historical oppressor or patient. Instead, it constructs a relationship the viewer must complete: power appears embodied, but the person who holds it is also subject to treatment. The result is less a monument to authority than an apparatus for asking what oppression does internally.

 
 

Four Winners Reveal K21’s Acquisition Strategy

The official records for all four awards make the collection strategy visible. Each edition has produced a materially different acquisition associated with an artist working across a different geographic context.

Year	Laureate	What entered K21
2023	Senzeni Mthwakazi Marasela South Africa	Performance-derived dresses, embroidered cloth, and watercolor
2024	Wang Tuo China	The Second Interrogation, a three-channel 4K video installation
2025	Tadáskía Brazil	A site-specific wall painting with sculptures made from taboa plant fiber
2026	Julia Phillips Born in Germany; based in the United States	Ceramic, stainless steel, and nylon installation

Marasela’s acquisition grew from the performed story of Theodora Mthetyane and included the red dresses through which the artist explored waiting, migration, and women’s lives under apartheid. Wang’s work brought a long-form moving-image argument about art, censorship, and modern Chinese history. Tadáskía’s installation joined drawing to a plant material associated by K21 with Afro-Indigenous communities in Latin America. Phillips adds an apparatus-like sculpture in which bodily casts make psychological and institutional power physical.

The sequence is evidence of variety within the award, not proof that each medium or region was previously absent from the entire state collection. That narrower conclusion matters. K21 already holds international video and installation art; the award’s contribution is a structured series of named acquisitions, not the invention of those categories.

Phillips is the first laureate in the official four-winner list who was born in Germany. Her Chicago base and German-American career still fit the award’s international remit, but the 2026 diversification case rests less on distance from Düsseldorf than the first three choices did. It rests on whose account of power enters the collection and on the ceramic, bodily vocabulary through which she gives that account form. That is also why an acquisition award is a consequential act of curating: the decision shapes what a public museum can preserve and show after the prize year ends.

K21 in Düsseldorf’s Ständehaus. Photograph by Leoni1234, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

 
 

The “2021” Headline Is a Publication Error

One date in the early coverage needs correction. A September 22 Monopol report currently headlines the result as the “Global Art Award 2021,” while spelling Phillips’s surname correctly. Its own body gives the correct year, 2026, and the correct spelling, Phillips. K21’s permanent award record also identifies Phillips as the 2026 winner and dates her presentation to 2026–27. This is a headline error, not a dispute about which edition she won.

Senzeni Marasela, the inaugural K21 Global Art Award laureate. Self-portrait by the artist, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

 
 

A 2020 Work, a 2026 Award, and a Permanent Loan

• Phillips is the official fourth K21 Global Art Award laureate, and K21 selected her variable-dimension 2020 installation in ceramic, stainless steel, and nylon hardware.
• The Friends’ own description establishes the €100,000 as an acquisition award; the published rules place the acquired work with the Kunstsammlung on permanent loan.
• The four award records show a deliberate progression from performance-derived textiles to multichannel video, wall drawing with plant-fiber sculpture, and Phillips’s apparatus-like ceramic installation.
• The year 2021 in Monopol’s headline is contradicted by the report’s body and K21’s official 2026 record; the headline currently spells Phillips correctly.