Lee Ufan Wins 2026 Wolfgang Hahn Prize
4 December 2025
South Korean painter and sculptor Lee Ufan, a key figure of the Mono-ha movement, has been named the winner of the thirty-second Wolfgang Hahn Prize, presented by the Society for Modern Art at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. The museum, which sponsors the prize, will put €100,000 (about $115,000) in member donations toward purchasing work by Ufan for its collection. A solo exhibition of his work will be on view at the institution from November 7, 2026 to April 4, 2027.
Born in Seoul in 1936, Ufan emigrated to Japan at the age of twenty. During the late 1960s and early ’70s, he helped to found the Mono-ha, or “school of things,” movement, which placed natural and industrial materials in the service of minimalist works. A trained philosopher, Ufan centers process, materials, and the relation between viewer and site in his practice. He is best known for his minimal paintings, featuring fields of brushstrokes inspired by the Korean Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting) movement, and for his powerful sculptures incorporating stones and iron plates.
“Lee Ufan has spoken about how his experiences with several exhibitions in Germany in the 1970s brought his work to the world stage,” said this year’s guest juror, Mami Kataoka, director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum. “Over the course of his sixty-year career, he has explored the essential meaning of existence in all relationships that transcend East and West—without following Western modernism or retreating into Eastern spiritual traditions.”
Inaugurated in 1994, the Wolfgang Hahn Prize honors established contemporary artists who are internationally recognized but are not yet as well known in Germany as they deserve to be. Previous winners of the honor include Francis Alÿs, Anna Boghiguian, Frank Bowling, Trisha Donnelly, Isa Genzken, Mike Kelley, Kerry James Marshall, Betye Saar, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, and Haegue Yang.
Find out more via Artforum.
Image: Lee Ufan at the Alyscamps, 2021 © Lee Ufan, Claire Dorn, Courtesy the artist, Photography by Claire Dorn
