Birke Gorm Wins Otto Mauer Prize for Contemporary Art

Artist Birke Gorm has won the Otto Mauer Prize. The award recognizes her independent sculptural and installative practice.

Since 1981, the Otto Mauer Fund of the Archdiocese of Vienna has given the prize to artists whose work bridges artistic and social discourse in an innovative way. The award follows the legacy of Monsignor Otto Mauer as a patron of contemporary art.

The jury praised Gorm for addressing questions of social value orders, labor, and gender relations through subtle and powerful means. Using simple, used, and seemingly worthless materials, Gorm builds works that oscillate between fragility and monumentality, body and abstraction.

Gorm studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Design School Kolding in Denmark. Her recent work includes the Austrian contribution to the 16th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, titled “the evening and the morning and the night,” where she transformed the top floor of the Eunam Museum of Art into an attic of memory.

The jury for this year’s prize consisted of Johanna Schwanberg, director of the Dom Museum Wien and jury chair, along with artists Iris Andraschek and Cäcilia Brown, independent curator Rainer Fuchs, curator and critic Klaus Speidel, and Belvedere chief curator Luisa Ziaja.

Exhibition and Acquisition Plans

As is tradition for the prize, one of the winner’s works will be purchased for the Otto Mauer Collection at the Dom Museum Wien. Gorm will also receive a dedicated exhibition at the JesuitenFoyer, scheduled to open on December 16.

The official award ceremony will take place on November 19 at the Archbishop’s Palace. Gwangju Biennale runs through November 15.