A decade-long transatlantic partnership between London’s Serpentine and New York’s FLAG Art Foundation will distribute £1 million across five biennial prizes.
The prize is open to artists who have been exhibiting professionally in major global institutions for fewer than ten years, with a track record that includes gallery representation, critical attention and international exhibition history. It appeals specifically to those in the precarious middle ground; artists who have already demonstrated serious intent but have not yet secured the kind of sustained institutional support that transforms a promising career into a strong and lasting one.
The winning artist receives not just funds but a solo exhibition at Serpentine in London, followed by a presentation at FLAG in New York, with each show accompanied by a catalogue and a live programme developed collaboratively by both organisations. The first award will be made in 2026, with the inaugural Serpentine exhibition opening in Autumn 2027 and travelling to FLAG in Spring 2028.
The numbers are straightforward enough: £200,000 every two years, five artists over a decade, one prize each cycle.
To define the prize, The Serpentine x FLAG Art Foundation Prize has named five jurors whose combined geography, institutional range and curatorial sensibility sketch out a particular vision of where contemporary art is headed, or at least where these two institutions believe it should be going.
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine’s Artistic Director, sits alongside FLAG’s Director Jonathan Rider, but the more telling appointments are the three external voices: Michelle Kuo, Chief Curator at Large and Publisher at MoMA; Venus Lau, Director of Museum MACAN in Jakarta; and the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, co-founder of The Land Foundation in Chiang Mai and long-standing figure in the relational aesthetics tradition.
Lau’s presence in particular is worth noting. Her career spans the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal in Shenzhen, and K11 Art Foundation in Hong Kong, a curatorial biography that cuts through Southeast and East Asian contemporary art.
FLAG is not new to this kind of support structure. Its previous iteration, the Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize, co-organised with The Contemporary Austin (backed Nicole Eisenman (2020), Tarek Atoui (2022), Lubaina Himid (2024) and Sable Elyse Smith (2026)). That list, which includes artists working across sound, painting and installation from a range of cultural backgrounds, offers a reasonable indication of the appetite for range that FLAG brings to this new partnership.
Serpentine, led by CEO Bettina Korek and Obrist, brings its own considerable convening power: free access across two sites in Kensington Gardens, a public art programme with an ambitious commissioning record, and an institutional identity built on international reach. The combination of Serpentine’s London platform and FLAG’s New York base creates a genuinely bilateral structure rather than the more familiar model of a British prize with a secondary international dimension.
The Selection Committee in Full
- Michelle Kuo: Chief Curator at Large and Publisher, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; formerly Editor-in-Chief of Artforum International (2010–2017); PhD from Harvard University
- Venus Lau: Director, Museum MACAN, Jakarta; formerly Artistic Director at K11 Art Foundation and OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen
- Hans Ulrich Obrist: Artistic Director, Serpentine; Senior Advisor, LUMA Arles; over 350 exhibitions curated since 1991
- Jonathan Rider: Director, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York; writer whose work has appeared in Art in America
- Rirkrit Tiravanija: Artist associated with relational aesthetics; co-founder, The Land Foundation, Chiang Mai; exhibitor at the Venice Biennale and major institutions worldwide
overview
Prize value: £200,000 per award, £1 million total over ten years; Frequency: Biennial; First award: 2026. Inaugural exhibition: Serpentine, London, Autumn 2027; FLAG Art Foundation, New York, Spring 2028; Eligibility: Artists of any age or nationality, exhibiting professionally in major global institutions for fewer than ten years; Serpentine website: serpentinegalleries.org
