Nordwestkunst Prize 2025 goes to Lotti Brockmann

In 2025, NORDWESTKUNST will once again serve as a premier platform where visitors can discover a diverse range of artistic positions, with artists from the northwest region competing for the prestigious biennial NORDWESTKUNST prize.

Following an initial jury meeting, 31 works from a record 521 portfolios were selected for display at the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven. The exhibition will feature a diverse array of media, including painting, video, installation, sculpture, sound art, graphics, performance, and art in public spaces. This dynamic showcase offers a compelling insight into the creative forces that motivate and move contemporary artists.

The exhibition addresses the state of the world, the interplay between humans and nature, the experience of migration and displacement, decolonial practices, urbanity and visions of the future, the human body, as well as artistic explorations of form, colour, material and space.

Performances, exhibition tours and talks invite visitors to ask questions and deepen their understanding of art through direct dialogue. An expert jury will meet during the exhibition period to select the prize winners from the works on display. The NORDWESTKUNST prize, which is awarded by the Verein der Kunstfreunde für Wilhelmshaven e. V., consists of a solo exhibition and catalogue in the following year.

"Lotti Brockmann's artistic practice explores the boundaries of the object-like. In line with neo-materialist discourses, Brockmann understands materiality not as a passive carrier medium, but as an active player in the structure of all relationships.
The focus is on the ephemeral: language, action, memory and affect are used as artistic means, as are unstable materials that undermine the supposedly solid. Loss is not only a theme, but also gives form to the works themselves. Many works are therefore always created anew for an exhibition; they elude permanence and refuse to be archived. In this ambivalence - between preservation and disappearance - Brockmann negotiates questions about the present: How do we deal with changing systems - such as nature - or with the need to capture something that no longer exists, such as historical narratives?
Between popular cultural references and political power structures, Brockmann searches for an artistic language that interweaves these layers. Her works open up spaces in which these relationships are not only depicted, but can also be experienced physically, materially and affectively.
Lotti Brockmann was awarded the Northwest Art Prize of the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven in 2025 and nominated for the Simacek Award in Vienna. In 2023 she received the Playground Art Prize, among Nicolaus Schafhausen, Franciska Zólyom, Leonie Radine and Dr. Florence Thurmes. Her work has been shown in Germany, Austria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary, among others. In November 2024, her artistic practice was represented as a solo position at Artissima in Turin (Italy)."

Lotti Brockmann is a student at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in the studio of Art and Space | Spatial Strategies with Iman Issa.