Agrigento artist Rosa Barba is the winner of the 19th Zurich Art Prize, a major art prize awarded annually by Zurich’s Museum Haus Konstruktiv and the Zurich insurance group. This is the first time an Italian artist has won the prize, established in 2007. The Sicilian artist, who was born in Agrigento in 1972 and lives in Berlin, succeeds Arthur Lescher, who won it in 2025, and many big names in world art who have achieved the prize in previous years, for example Damián Ortega in 2023, Latifa Echakhch in 2015, Adrián Villar Rojas in 2013, Mariana Castillo Debal in 2012, and Tino Sehgal in 2009. Barba will now receive 100,000 Swiss francs (about 106,000 euros) for an exhibition at the Museum Haus Konstructiv in Zurich, as well as another 30,000 francs (about 32,000 euros) for winning the prize. The news was announced by the German magazine Monopol.
The jury, the magazine reports, particularly appreciated Barba’s conceptual approach and her sensitivity to the specific exhibition space. The annual award honors an artistic practice that is able to coninuate “the cultural heritage of constructivist-concrete and conceptual art with contemporary trends,” according to a statement. Barba’s conceptual installations employ film, sculpture and sound as a means of breaking down divisions between time and space, and address diverse themes, particularly the impact of human beings on the natural world.
Rosa Barba is among the most recognized Italian artists abroad. She has been teaching art at the ETH in Zurich since 2023. Her works have been exhibited in various international contexts, for example at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and the Venice Biennale. This summer he presented the installation The Ocean of One’s Pause at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as part of an exhibition that brought together 12 of Rosa Barba’s works made over a 15-year period, and united by the common thread of light understood as an agent of ecological change. “My work always involves a search for the sublime in some way, and it explores perception and how we look at things, even when they are dangerous or catastrophic,” Barba told Art in America magazine in June. “But there’s always this sense of fragility: catastrophe and beauty are often closely linked, and I’m interested in following that line.”
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| Rosa Barba wins Zurich Art Prize: first time for an Italian artist |
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