The Kandinsky Prize works as a two-year competition in which artworks and books are nominated by application, screened by an expert council into a long list, cut by a jury to a short list, and then judged a final time by the same jury, which names the winners at a ceremony during an exhibition of the nominees. Its last published rules, for the 13th edition in 2021, limited the two art categories to adult citizens of the Russian Federation, asked for applications by email rather than through a portal, and set no entry fee that we could find. No edition has been announced since 2021 (checked October 2026), so what follows describes the documented process as a historical record.

We are an independent arts title, not the organiser. Everything below comes from archived copies of the prize's own rules pages, its winner announcements and press coverage. Where the brief we started from described an open international call, a fee, and an autumn-to-spring calendar, the record says otherwise, and we explain the differences as we go.

The prize at a glance

  • Organiser: BREUS Foundation, the charitable foundation of the publisher and collector Shalva Breus, who founded the prize in 2007. Our separate explainer on kandinskyprize.org covers the prize's history in more detail.
  • Frequency: "once every two years on the results of a creative competition", according to the archived page for participants from December 2021. Early editions were annual.
  • Categories in 2021: Project of the Year; Young Artist. Project of the Year, for authors aged up to and including 35; and Scholarly Work. History and Theory of Contemporary Art.
  • Prize fund in 2021: 1,800,000 roubles for Project of the Year and 450,000 roubles for Young Artist. The Scholarly Work winner received publication through BREUS Publishing in Russian or English, or a cash award if the book was already in print. Every winner also received a symbolic trophy.
  • Who judged: an expert council and an international jury for the art categories, and a separate expert council and jury for the scholarly category.
  • Latest edition: the 13th, with winners announced on 17 November 2021.

Who could apply and what could be entered

The archived conditions of participation for 2021 are short and specific. For the two art categories, only adult citizens of the Russian Federation were admitted, and the Young Artist category was capped at age 35. The Scholarly Work category was wider: adult citizens of Russia and of other countries could take part, with texts accepted in Russian or English.

Several rules are less obvious:

  • Who could nominate. The author could apply, but so could any other person or organisation, and so could members of the jury and expert council of either category.
  • Consent. A work could be put forward without first asking the artist, but the participation agreement and a consent to personal data processing then had to be signed by both the author and the owner of the work.
  • Time window. For the 13th edition, eligible works had to have been made between 1 January 2018 and 19 February 2021.
  • Repeat entries. Works entered before could be submitted again if they had not reached a long list.
  • Numbers. There was no limit on how many works one author could put forward in a category, but each needed its own application. One author could also compete in more than one category with different works, within the age limits.
  • What counted. Painting, graphics, sculpture, photography, street art, installation (including video and audio installation), performance and multimedia projects were eligible. Decorative and applied art was excluded, and so were group exhibitions.

That last point corrects the brief, which suggested collectives were "sometimes" allowed. Co-authored works were accepted, with every co-author filling in the forms, but a group show as such could not be entered.

How an application was put together

The application rules for the art categories read more like a checklist than a call for entries. Applicants downloaded a document pack and completed:

  1. An application form, saved as an editable PDF. Scanned or photographed forms were refused, and passport details and addresses had to be written out in full.
  2. A description of the work in Russian and in English, each version up to 1,500 characters with spaces, without the work's title.
  3. A short biography in both languages, up to 500 characters each, without the author's name.
  4. Captions in both languages giving author, title, year, type of work, technique, size or running time, and lender.
  5. An insurance value, defined as the author's material costs in making the work, plus any special display requirements.
  6. The signed agreement and the signed data consent.

Images had to be JPEG or TIFF files at 300 dpi or at least 2,500 pixels on the long side, up to 50 images and no more than 100 megabytes each. Video and performance could be sent as MP4 files of up to 50 megabytes or as Vimeo or YouTube links kept public for the whole competition. A portrait photograph of the author went in a separate file. Everything was then sent in a single email, and incomplete applications were either not considered or returned for revision.

The brief described an online portal and an entry fee. We found neither in the archived rules, which describe email submission and mention no fee at any point.

The scholarly category had its own rules for Scholarly Work applications. Applicants sent the text as a PDF along with at least two signed reviews from specialists in art history or theory who held an academic degree. Eligible texts were published or unpublished monographs, dissertations, studies and articles on Russian art of the second half of the 20th century and the 21st century.

The three voting stages

According to the archived conditions page, every application passed through three stages of selection.

Stage one, the long list. The expert council of each category voted to choose the nominees. For the two art categories this stage had two rounds. The first round was held with authors' names and work titles hidden, which is why the rules banned names from descriptions, captions, video credits and even video-hosting profiles. Our separate article on blind judging in art prizes looks at that rule in detail.

Stage two, the short list. The jury of each category chose the finalists from the long list.

Stage three, the winners. The same jury voted again to choose the winners.

The rules describe these stages but do not publish a scoring sheet or weighted criteria. The brief's statement that criteria such as originality and technical accomplishment were "published in advance" is not supported by the archived pages, so we have removed it.

Two winner announcements give a sense of scale. In 2014 the international jury chose its winners from 9 finalists, who were exhibited alongside 26 other nominees at the Udarnik building in Moscow from 18 September to 30 November 2014. The 2014 winners announcement adds that "the international jury decided on the winners one hour before the award ceremony" and that compliance of the voting with the rules was overseen by EY. In 2021 the expert council's long list held 34 works instead of the usual 30: sixteen Projects of the Year, eleven Young Artist entries and seven books, two of them unpublished manuscripts, according to the 2021 nominees exhibition page.

Who sat on the expert council and jury

The expert council page for 2021 lists ten members for the art categories. They included Irina Gorlova, head of the department of new trends at the State Tretyakov Gallery, the critic and curator Andrei Erofeev, Anastasia Kurekhina of the Sergey Kurekhin Foundation, the gallerist Sergei Popov and Ilya Shipilovskikh, head of the art gallery of the Yeltsin Center in Yekaterinburg. Members came from Moscow, St Petersburg, Krasnoyarsk, Nizhny Novgorod and Yekaterinburg, with one based between Moscow and Lecce. The scholarly council had six members, among them Nikolai Molok, editor of the journal Iskusstvoznanie, and Alla Rosenfeld of the Merrill C. Berman Collection in New York.

Juries were international from the start. The English Wikipedia entry on the prize lists the first jury in 2007 as Jean-Hubert Martin, Valerie Hillings and Andrei Erofeev, and records that more than 250 names were put forward that year before the field was cut to 50.

How the calendar actually ran

The brief offered a neat table: entries in autumn, a shortlist in winter, an exhibition in spring and a ceremony in late spring. The documented calendar of the last editions ran almost the other way.

For the 13th edition, the eligibility window for works closed on 19 February 2021, and the participants page stated that the long list would be announced in May 2021. The exhibition of nominees, finalists and winners was staged at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art on Petrovka and closed on 21 November 2021, with the winners named on 17 November: Andrei Kuzkin for Project of the Year, Albina Mokhryakova for Young Artist and Roman Osminkin for Scholarly Work. Two years earlier, the 2019 winners announcement records a ceremony at the same museum on 13 November 2019, again held during the nominees' exhibition.

In short, applications closed in late winter, the long list followed in spring, and the exhibition and ceremony came in the autumn. The 2014 edition followed the same rhythm, with an autumn exhibition at Udarnik.

Prizes and what winners received

Prize money changed over the years, so every figure needs its year. In 2014 the main award was worth 40,000 euros and Young Artist 10,000 euros. By 2019 and 2021 the amounts were set in roubles: 1,800,000 and 450,000. The BBC, reporting on the 2012 prize shared by two winners, described the award as "designed to be Russia's answer to the Turner Prize", and like Tate's Turner Prize it rewarded a recent project rather than a career.

Beyond the money, the documented benefits were the exhibition itself and, for the scholarly winner, publication. The brief's claims that winners routinely go on to solo shows and residencies, or return as jurors and mentors, are not documented in the sources we found, so we have left them out.

Where the prize stands in October 2026

The prize's original website is still online, but its latest news dates from late 2021, and we found no call for a 14th edition (checked October 2026). Several of its current pages carry unrelated third-party content, which is why every rules link here points to a dated archive copy. Treat these rules as the record of how the prize worked up to 2021, not as a guide to a live competition.

If a new call does appear, check it against the organiser's own published terms: who is eligible, whether there is any fee, how applications are submitted and who sits on the council and jury. Other competitions also use Kandinsky's name, and their rules are their own. For broader coverage of prizes and exhibitions, our sister title ArtCulture UK follows the contemporary art world from a British perspective.