Once a year, the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst at Museum Ludwig in Cologne award the Wolfgang Hahn Prize to contemporary artists. On 12 April 2014 Kerry James Marshall is honored.

Elena Filipovic, art critic and senior curator at the WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, remarks the jury’s decision: “A painter’s painter as much as he is an astute social critic, Kerry James Marshall has built an uncompromising body of work that includes collage, sculpture, animation, and video-making alongside a deep attachment to painting as a medium. In his hands, painting is both intimately connected to a historic painterly tradition and also fiercely tied to the present—its social injustices, race relations, power dynamics, and political realities. An exploration of blackness, and a call for the representation of the black subject—so long left out of art history—mark his oeuvre. The Wolfgang Hahn Prize is proud to recognize this African American artist whose oeuvre testifies to one of the most engaged positions in painting today.”

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