PROJECT | GOZO YOSHIMASU SELECTED AS THE RECIPIENT OF THE INAUGURAL SERPENTINE X THE FLAG ART FOUNDATION PRIZE
Serpentine and The FLAG Art Foundation are honoured to announce that Gozo Yoshimasu has been awarded the inaugural Serpentine x FLAG Art Foundation Prize.
The recipient was selected by an official jury comprising Michelle Kuo, Venus Lau, Hans Ulrich Obrist (Serpentine) and Jon Rider (FLAG Art Foundation) and Rirkrit Tiravanija. The jury convened in London on Thursday 23 April to determine the winner.
Over the next decade, a total of £1 million (£200,000 biennially) will be awarded to five recipients, providing unmatched support at a pivotal moment in their careers. This is the UK’s largest contemporary art prize given to a single artist.
Gozo Yoshimasu (b. 1939, Tokyo, Japan; lives and works in Tokyo, Japan) will stage a solo exhibition that debuts at Serpentine North in autumn 2027, followed by a presentation reimagined for the FLAG Art Foundation in New York in spring 2028. This long-term collaboration initiates an ongoing artistic dialogue between the two institutions and underscores their shared belief in the power of collaboration to shape the future of contemporary art.
Having emerged from Tokyo’s interdisciplinary avant-garde of the 1960s, Yoshimasu has developed a distinctive practice that combines poetry with performance, audio recordings, photography and his own moving-image form known as gozoCiné. The exhibition will mark the first major solo institutional exhibition of the artist’s work in both the UK and the United States. It will be accompanied by a dedicated catalogue and a dynamic live programme, developed and produced collaboratively by both institutions.
The prize is intended to provide artists, at a significant stage in their careers, with the time, freedom and resources to experiment, follow new lines of enquiry and develop work in whatever direction feels most meaningful.
