Firenze 50124
Italy
In a year that marks 120 years since the founding of Villa Romana, we are delighted to announce the recipients of the Villa Romana Prize 2026. Since its inception in 1905, the Villa Romana Prize has been dedicated to supporting artists who expand the horizons of artistic practice.
The selected artists for 2026 are Charmaine Poh, Mikołaj Sobczak, Gülbin Ünlü, and Susanne Sachsse (KHI Fellow).
The jurors for the Fellows 2026 were Franciska Zólyom and Johannes Paul Raether. The prize winners were nominated by Karimah Ashadu, Rosa Barba, Carina Bukuts, and Leonie Radine.
We warmly welcome the following Fellows for 2026:
Charmaine Poh
Charmaine Poh is an artist working across moving image and performance to peel apart, interrogate, and hold ideas of agency, repair, and the body across worlds. She aligns herself with strategies of visibility, opacity, deviance, and futurity. She has exhibited at the Singapore Art Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art, Blindspot Gallery, REDCAT LA, Huis Marseille, and the 60th Venice Biennale—Foreigners Everywhere, among others. In 2019, she was one of Forbes Asia’s 30 under 30 in the arts. She was recently named Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year for 2025.
Mikołaj Sobczak
Mikołaj Sobczak is an artist based in Düsseldorf whose practice spans painting, video, and performance. His work draws from queer activism and alternative historiographies, being an effect of a close collaboration with historians and theorists. He studied in Warsaw, Berlin, and Münster, and was an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam from 2021 to 2023, as well as at the Art Explora residency in Paris (2023–24). He has exhibited internationally at Salzburger Kunstverein (2025), BOZAR Brussels (2025), Ludwig Forum, Aachen (2023), Kunsthalle Münster (2022–23), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2021), MUDAM, Luxembourg (2021), and the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2020), with works in collections including LACMA, Moderna Museet, and Kunstsammlung NRW.
Gülbin Ünlü
Gülbin Ünlü is a Munich-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice weaves together painting, installation, video, performance, and music. Her work traverses genre boundaries and opens visual and sonic spaces in which memory, loss, and speculative futures intersect. At its core, her practice engages with affective archives, fragmented narratives, and the question of how aesthetic resistance can be articulated beyond dominant regimes of visibility. In 2025, she presented solo exhibitions at Haus der Kunst (Nostralgia) and Villa Stuck (Ultra Happy). In 2024, she held an interim professorship in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. Her works have been shown at institutions including Berlinische Galerie (2022) and Pinakothek der Moderne (2020). In addition to several music projects and artist publications, her self-titled monograph was recently published by Hammann von Mier Verlag. She was awarded, among others, the Förderpreis für Bildende Kunst of the City of Munich (2022), the Bayerischer Kunstförderpreis (2023), and the Zeitsicht Award (2024).
Susanne Sachsse
Susanne Sachsse is an artist and actress who was born and raised in East Germany, an experience that informs her artistic and political critique of nationalism and social norms. She had her first solo exhibition at Participant Inc (NYC, 2021) and has presented sound, video and object installations at Kestner Gesellschaft (Hanover, 2023), and Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, 2022). Her exhibition, Choose Mutation, with CHEAP, was presented at Accelerator (Stockholm, 2024) and Gropius Bau (Berlin, 2025) and will be at PS1 MoMA (NYC, 2025–26). She is the designated Artistic Research Fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz—Max-Planck-Institut.
The collaboration between Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz—Max-Planck-Institut and Villa Romana continues in its seventh year in 2026.
The Villa Romana Prize is the oldest German art prize. Since its inception in 1905 the history of the Villa Romana Prize has been connected with renowned artists.
The patron of the Villa Romana and founder of the Villa Romana Prize is the registered non-profit association Villa Romana e.V.
The Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM) is a main sponsor of Villa Romana since 2021. Further support comes from Deutsche Bank Foundation and BAO Foundation among others.
