On Tuesday, October 28, 2025, renowned artist Eva Beresin will receive the 10th Ruth Baumgarte Art Prize in the Musensaal of the Albertina in Vienna. The award is endowed with €20,000 and is one of the most highly endowed honors for artists in Germany.
In addition, a sponsorship award of €5,000 will be presented for the first time at the tenth award ceremony. It will go to South African artist Zandile Tshabalala.
Eva Beresin, born in Hungary in 1955 and based in Vienna since 1976, has created a distinctive body of work that combines expressive painting with psychological depth. Humor and irony permeate her works, as does a relentless exploration of existential themes. Executed in oil and acrylic, her paintings testify to the act of painting as a manifestation of freedom, directness, and authenticity.
Her imagery is populated by grotesque hybrids—creatures that are part human, part animal, whose appearance is at once comical, enigmatic, and uncanny. Between figuration and abstraction, concealment and revelation, Beresin develops a visual language that brings together the everyday and the abysmal, the surreal and the fragmentary in a dazzling combination.
The artist's alter ego appears again and again—naked, with red lips and red fingernails—as a singular figure or part of complex scenes. These self-portrayals function as both signature and projection surface. Marked by biographical ruptures, especially the loss of family members in the Holocaust, Beresin focuses her gaze on the repressed, the taboo, and the unconscious. In her works, fear, desire, and vulnerability become pictorial forces that make the human experience tangible in all its ambivalence. Beresin achieves a rare balance: humorous exaggeration and grotesque intensification combine with the radical disclosure of existential dimensions.
Eva Beresin, Calm down, 2021, oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm, Collection Beth Rudin De Woody
Regularly represented at the Charim Gallery in Vienna since 2003, her work gained widespread attention through the exhibition Thick Air (Albertina Vienna, 2024). In 2019, American curator Kenny Schachter discovered her work on Instagram and invited her to participate in the Felix Art Fair Los Angeles—a decisive step toward her international recognition.
Eva Beresin, The Main Ingredients Bring It to Boil and Increase the Appetite, 2023, oil and acrylic on canvas, 220×290 cm, private collection, Vienna
Statement by the jury
"The painterly, graphic worlds of Hungarian artist Eva Beresin, who has lived and worked in Vienna since 1976, are populated by hybrid creatures, grotesque figures, and strange-looking fantasy beings. She often endows her subjects, which she has also translated into sculptures in recent years, with animalistic behavior—and vice versa, many animals have human traits.
The artist's thematic range, which encompasses the existential as well as the tragicomic, extends from medieval-style cruelties to everyday banalities to humorous episodes. Beresin's oeuvre is a universe that celebrates being out of joint with mischief and pranks. Moments of nonsense come together to form an apotheosis of the marginal. The outstanding work marries the fantastic with the terrible, the beautiful with the horrific." - Angela Stief, Director of ALBERTINA Modern, Vienna
First-time award of a sponsorship prize to Zandile Tshabalala
On the occasion of the tenth award ceremony, a sponsorship prize of €5,000 will be awarded for the first time. It goes to South African artist Zandile Tshabalala.
Born in Soweto in 1999, Zandile Tshabalala is one of the most distinctive voices of a young generation of South African painters who are confidently redefining the image of black women in art history. After graduating from the University of the Witwatersrand (2022), she now lives and works in Johannesburg.
Her paintings, mostly executed in acrylic, combine a rigorous formal language with intense color. At the center is the Black woman as an autonomous subject, not as an object of the gaze. Themes such as trauma, joy, temporality, and care are condensed in multi-layered portraits in which moments of calm appear as a conscious counterpoint to societal role expectations.
With her “dreamscapes,” Tshabalala creates spaces of female self-determination in which beauty and sensuality take on a political dimension. In a reflective dialogue with artists such as Kerry James Marshall and Mickalene Thomas, she develops a powerful visual language that inextricably links cultural identity, fashionable forms of expression, and aesthetic self-empowerment.
She gained international attention through her participation in the exhibition When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting (2022–23), whose official image motif was one of her works. Since then, her works have been shown at Zeitz MOCAA Cape Town, Kunstmuseum Basel, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kunstmuseum Magdeburg, and ADA Contemporary Accra, among others.
Zandile Tshabalala, Yellow Blossoms, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 200 cm, photo: Sascha Herrmann
Statement by Alexander Baumgarte
Chair of the Board of the Ruth Baumgarte Art Foundation
"By awarding a sponsorship prize to Zandile Tshabalala for the first time, we are sending a signal for the promotion of an important artistic position which, like the work of Ruth Baumgarte, combines social responsibility and artistic freedom in a special way.
With her impressive paintings, Tshabalala represents a new perspective on identity, self-determination, and dignity. She addresses themes that moved Ruth Baumgarte throughout her life: the position of humans in a changing world and the power of art to create empathy and awareness. With this sponsorship award, we want to continue this approach and make it visible internationally."
Zandile Tshabalala, Two Reclining Women, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 91.6 x 122 cm, Maduna Collection, photo: Kunstmuseum Basel