The Kandinsky Award, better known in English as the Kandinsky Prize, is a Russian national prize for contemporary art founded in 2007 by the publisher and collector Shalva Breus and named after the painter Wassily Kandinsky. It rewards a recent project rather than a lifetime of work, and its winners are chosen by an international jury working with an expert council. Thirteen editions were held between 2007 and 2021, and as of October 2026 no later edition has been announced on the prize's own pages.

That short answer corrects a common misunderstanding. The prize is sometimes described online as an open international competition for abstract or "visionary" art with entry fees. The documented rules say something different, and the details below come from the prize's published conditions, its winner announcements and press coverage.

The Kandinsky Prize at a glance

  • Founded: 2007, by Shalva Breus through the ArtChronika Culture Foundation, later renamed BREUS Foundation, according to the Russian-language Wikipedia entry on the prize.
  • First ceremony: 4 December 2007 at the Winzavod contemporary art centre in Moscow, as recorded in the English Wikipedia summary.
  • Original sponsor: Deutsche Bank, which backed the first editions alongside ArtChronika.
  • Frequency: annual at first, then every two years. The conditions page archived in December 2021 states that the prize is awarded once every two years on the results of a creative competition.
  • Latest recorded edition: the 13th prize, announced on 17 November 2021 at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.
  • Categories (later rules): Project of the Year, Young Artist. Project of the Year, and Scholarly Work. History and Theory of Contemporary Art.

Who founded the prize and why

Shalva Breus is a businessman who made his money in publishing. The BBC's 2012 report on the prize describes him as "a Georgian-born businessman who made a fortune in the Russian publishing industry" and calls the award "designed to be Russia's answer to the Turner Prize". The comparison with Tate's Turner Prize stuck in English-language coverage because both awards focus on a single recent body of work and both end with a public exhibition of the finalists.

The Russian Wikipedia article sets out three founding principles: winners are judged by an international jury with the participation of an expert council, artists can take part through self-nomination with maximum openness, and the prize is a continuous process rather than a one-off event. That process ran from applications through two rounds of expert voting, a long list and a short list, an exhibition of nominees, jury voting and, finally, the ceremony.

Breus's own summary of the project appears on the prize website's page for its 15th-anniversary exhibition. In our translation from the Russian: "The Kandinsky Prize scrupulously recorded the history of contemporary art over 15 years and, almost without noticing, itself became part of that history." The original wording is on the archived exhibition page.

Why it carries Kandinsky's name

Wassily Kandinsky (1866 to 1944), whose artist page at Tate covers his career from Moscow to Munich and Paris, is widely credited as one of the first painters to work in pure abstraction. His 1911 treatise, available in Michael Sadler's English translation as Concerning the Spiritual in Art on Project Gutenberg, contains one of the most quoted lines in modern art: "Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings."

The organisers chose the date with care. The first ceremony took place on 4 December, Kandinsky's birthday in the old Russian calendar, according to the Russian Wikipedia account. The name signals ambition rather than style, however. Winners have included sculpture, video, performance and installation, and the prize was never limited to abstract painting.

How the categories and prize money worked

The prize structure changed several times, so any figure needs a date attached.

At the first edition in 2007, four awards were given: Artist of the Year with 40,000 euros, a Media Art Project of the Year with 10,000 euros, a Young Artist award for an artist under 30 with a three-month residency at Villa Romana in Florence, and an audience prize of 5,000 euros. The total was 55,000 euros, as listed in the English Wikipedia entry, which draws on Deutsche Bank's original press release.

By 2012, the BBC reported a 40,000 euro main prize and a 10,000 euro award for artists under 35. The media art category ran from 2007 to 2011 and was then dropped. A Scholarly Work category for the history and theory of contemporary art was added in 2014.

In the later rouble-denominated rules, Project of the Year carried 1,800,000 roubles and Young Artist. Project of the Year carried 450,000 roubles. The Scholarly Work winner received publication through BREUS Publishing in Russian or English, or a cash award if the book was already published. The 2019 winners announcement confirms that these amounts stayed the same that year.

Who could take part

The brief we were given suggested an open, international call. The archived conditions of participation say otherwise for the art categories:

  • Only adult citizens of the Russian Federation could take part in Project of the Year and Young Artist. Project of the Year.
  • The Young Artist category was limited to artists aged up to and including 35.
  • The Scholarly Work category was open to adult citizens of Russia and of other countries, with texts accepted in Russian or English.
  • Applications could be made by the artist or by another person or organisation, and works could be put forward without the artist's prior agreement, provided the artist and the owner then signed the participation agreement.
  • There was no limit on the number of works per artist, but each needed a separate application. Group exhibitions were excluded, as were decorative and applied arts.

The eligible media list was broad: painting, graphics, sculpture, photography, street art, installation (including video and audio), performance and multimedia projects. The BBC noted in 2012 that "one of the distinctive features of the prize is that artists are able to nominate themselves", and that year saw a record 385 submissions. We found no published entry fee in the archived rules, so we have removed the brief's section on fees.

How the jury chose winners

Selection ran in three stages, according to the archived conditions page. An expert council voted first, in two rounds for the art categories, to produce the long list of nominees. The jury then chose a short list of finalists, and in a third vote the same jury picked the winners.

One detail stands out. The application rules required that names and titles be left out of descriptions, image captions and video credits, because the expert council's first vote was held with authors' names and work titles hidden. Later stages, including the public exhibition of nominees, were not anonymous.

The prize did not publish a points-based scoring rubric. The Russian Wikipedia article summarises the main criterion as how far an artist's newest works have influenced Russian contemporary art over the previous two years, which is why it is not an award for long service.

Juries were international. The 2007 panel was Jean-Hubert Martin, Valerie Hillings of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Andrei Erofeev of the Tretyakov Gallery, and in 2012 the BBC described a jury of Russian and US experts.

Winners and exhibitions

Each edition included an exhibition of nominees, and the venues moved. Shortlisted work from 2011 was shown at the Central House of Artists in Moscow, which the BBC says drew more than 35,000 visitors, before touring to Riga, Berlin and London. The 2017 winners were announced at the Udarnik building in Moscow, and the 2019 and 2021 ceremonies were held at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.

The main award has gone to, among others, Anatoly Osmolovsky (2007), Vadim Zakharov (2009), Alexander Brodsky (2010), Yuri Albert (2011), Grisha Bruskin and the collective AES+F jointly (2012), Irina Nakhova (2013), Pavel Pepperstein (2014), the ZIP group (2017), Evgeny Antufiev (2019) and Andrei Kuzkin, who won in 2016 and again in 2021. The full list of Project of the Year winners appears on the 15th-anniversary exhibition page, and the 2021 results page names Albina Mokhryakova as Young Artist and Roman Osminkin for Scholarly Work.

That anniversary show, "Kandinsky Prize. 15 Years", opened on 22 December 2021 in the Arsenal of the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin and ran until 20 March 2022, presenting 14 winning works in reverse order from 2021 back to 2007.

Where the prize stands in October 2026

The prize's original website remains online, but its most recent news items date from late 2021, and we found no announcement of a 14th edition (checked October 2026). Several of its pages now carry unrelated third-party advertising, which is why we link to dated archive copies instead. Anyone researching the prize should treat the archived rules as a historical record and check any new call directly with BREUS Foundation before relying on it. Background on Breus and the foundation's activities is collected in the Russian Art Archive Network's entry on Shalva Breus.

Other prizes that carry Kandinsky's name

The Russian prize is not the first to use the name. Nina Kandinsky founded a Prix Kandinsky in Paris in memory of her husband, and it ran from 1946 to 1961 to support young artists working in abstraction. Its first winners were Jean Dewasne and Jean Deyrolle, and the last was Piero Dorazio, according to the French Wikipedia article on the Prix Kandinsky.

Other competitions use similar names today, and some describe themselves as Kandinsky awards. Their rules, fees and juries are their own, so read each organiser's terms directly. For wider coverage of prizes, exhibitions and the people behind them, our sister title ArtCulture UK follows the contemporary art world from a British perspective.