Wolfgang Tillmans Wins 2026 Roswitha Haftmann Prize. Artsy

German artist Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968) has been awarded the 2026 Roswitha Haftmann Prize, a distinction widely regarded as Europe's most financially significant arts prize. The award carries 150,000 Swiss francs, or about $190,000, and will be presented at Kunsthaus Zürich on September 17.

The Roswitha Haftmann Foundation said the prize recognizes Tillmans's four-decade career and the breadth of a practice that has repeatedly pushed photography beyond its conventional frame. Established in 2001 and named for the late Swiss dealer Roswitha Haftmann, the prize has previously gone to artists including Cindy Sherman, Cecilia Vicuña, Sigmar Polke, Rosemarie Trockel, and Jeff Wall.

Tillmans first rose to prominence in the 1990s with intimate photographs of LGBTIQ+ youth and rave nightlife, images that helped define a more candid visual language for contemporary photography. Since then, his work has expanded into still lifes, astronomical imagery, camera-less experiments, multimedia installations, sound works, and video. In its statement, the foundation pointed to his role in redefining the medium through portraiture, abstraction, installation, publishing, and political engagement.

That political dimension has long been central to Tillmans's public profile. He has organized campaigns opposing Brexit and encouraging voter participation in German and European elections. In 2017, he founded Between Bridges, a nonprofit supporting democracy, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and anti-racism initiatives.

The award also arrives after a run of major exhibitions that have kept Tillmans's work in wide circulation. These include the traveling survey“To Look Without Fear,” which opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2022 before traveling to Toronto and San Francisco, as well as 2025 presentations of“Weltraum” at the Albertinum in Dresden and“Nothing could have prepared us–Everything could have prepared us” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Tillmans's selection underscores how photography, in his hands, has become both a formal language and a civic one - attentive to private experience, but equally invested in the public sphere.

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