Petrit Halilaj has won the 2027 Nasher Prize. Aged 39, the Kosovar artist is the youngest recipient of the award in its history and receives $100,000 in prize money from Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center. Halilaj said he would donate the winnings to the Hajde! Foundation, a Kosovo-based nonprofit promoting artists, which he co-founded with his sister, Hana, in 2014.
“While my practice is continually shaped by my personal history rooted in Kosovo, the mission of Hajde! is to create possibilities for art to resonate both locally and beyond,” Halilaj said in a statement. “This gift will help ensure that spaces for imagining, creating, and dreaming beyond the limits of one’s own place can flourish.”
Born in 1986 in Kosterrc, a small village near the town of Runik, Halilaj studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan before relocating to Berlin in 2009. There, he was quickly recognized for his experimental work inspired by the fallout of the Kosovo War of 1998–99, which devastated his home country and defined his childhood. Personal history often becomes material for his art. One example is The places I’m looking for, my dear, are utopian places, they are boring and I don’t know how to make them real, commissioned for the 2010 Berlin Biennale. Halilaj built his parents a new home in Pristina, Kosovo, then carried the wooden casting slats to Berlin, transforming them into a skeletal sculpture at KW Institute for Contemporary Art.
Halilaj often transforms drawings into sculpture. For his show at Tate St. Ives in 2021, he presented more than 80 suspended felt forms, each an enlarged and reworked replica of 38 drawings he had originally created with Italian psychologist Giacomo Poli in a refugee camp in 1999. More recently, his commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2024 Roof Garden reworked a 2015 project, where he took children’s drawings and turned them into stainless steel and bronze sculptures.
“In his installations and performances, where drawings acquire a sculptural presence and the space of the imagination is literally unleashed, Halilaj reveals how experiences of pain are inextricably bound to moments of joy, tenderness, and connection,” Nasher director Carlos Basualdo said in a statement. “His work is particularly resonant today both for its deep investment in the humanity of lived experience, and for the way it creates spaces of encounter that transcend artistic, cultural, and geographic boundaries.”
Other prestigious institutions that Halilaj has presented solo exhibitions at include the Institut Giacometti in Paris, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, among many others. A solo exhibition, “An Opera Out of Time,” is on view at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof through May 2026.
Launched in 2015, the Nasher Prize celebrates contemporary artists who are pushing the boundaries of sculpture. Previous winners of the Prize include Otobong Nkanga in 2025, Senga Nengudi in 2023, and Nairy Baghramian in 2022.
