The Queen Sonja Art Foundation is pleased to announce the winners of the Queen Sonja Print Awards 2026. This year’s recipients are Tacita Dean (Queen Sonja Print Award), Judy Chicago (QSPA Lifetime Achievement Award), and Alejandra Aguilar Caballero (QSPA Inspirational Award). The Award Ceremony will take place in September 2026 at the National Museum in Oslo, where Her Majesty Queen Sonja will present the awards.
Tacita Dean receives Queen Sonja Print Award 2026
Previous winners include: 2024 Tomas Colbengtson, Sweden; 2022 Yto Barrada, France/ Marocco; 2020 Ciara Phillips, Canada/UK; 2018 Emma Nishimura, Canada; 2016 Tauba Auerbach, USA; 2014 Svend-Allan Sørensen, Denmark; and 2012 Tiina Kivinen, Finland.
Tacita Dean is a British European artist living and working in Berlin and Los Angeles. She has been the recipient of numerous prizes including the Cherry Kearton Medal and Award, Royal Geographical Society, United Kingdom in 2019; the Kurt Schwitters Prize in 2009, the Hugo Boss Prize at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 2006, and the Sixth Benesse Prize at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. Her recent solo exhibitions include the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio in 2025; The Menil Collection, Houston in 2024; the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection, Paris and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2023 and MUDAM, Luxembourg and The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles in 2022. In 2018, a trilogy of solo exhibitions was held at the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. In 2021, Dean designed the sets and costumes for the ballet The Dante Project, a collaborative production with the Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer Wayne McGregor and conductor-composer Thomas Adés. In 2011, Dean’s work FILM, shown in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, marked the beginning of a campaign to preserve photochemical film.
The jury praises Tacita Dean for her remarkable contribution to contemporary printmaking and for an established artistic practice that continues to evolve through bold experimentation. While widely known for her work in film, Dean brings cinematic sensibilities into print with a natural and unforced ease, producing large-scale works that are both technically accomplished and profoundly poetic. Working across lithography, offset, gravure, monoprinting, and silkscreen, Dean demonstrates a fearless commitment to pushing the boundaries of the medium. The jury notes her rare ability to make complexity cohere, transforming technical ambition into images of elegance, resonance, and emotional depth.
Judy Chicago receives QSPA Lifetime Achievement Award 2026
Previous winners include: 2024 Anselm Kiefer, Germany; 2022 William Kentridge, South Africa; 2020 Paula Rego, UK/Portugal; and 2018 David Hockney, US.
Judy Chicago (b. 1939, Chicago, USA) is a pioneering artist whose career spans nearly six decades. A central figure in the development of feminist art and education, she is best known for The Dinner Party (1974–79), a monumental symbolic history of women in Western civilisation.
Her work has addressed themes including birth and creation, masculinity, genocide, mortality, and humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Chicago has received numerous honours, including being named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People,” and her work continues to be exhibited internationally.
The jury is honoured to award the QSPA Lifetime Achievement Award to Judy Chicago for her pioneering contribution to printmaking and for her enduring impact on feminist expression in art. Throughout her career, Chicago has used works on paper as a powerful platform for visibility, challenging a male-dominated art world by placing female experience, sexuality, and identity at the centre of visual culture.
Through technically diverse print practices characterised by bold colour, geometric clarity, and layered narrative content, Chicago demonstrated how printmaking can function as both artistic and cultural intervention. For her lasting influence on the field and her role in forging a new feminist visual language, the jury proudly recognises her lifetime achievement.
Alejandra Aguilar Caballero recieves QSPA Inspirational Award 2026
Previous winners include: 2024 Kayo Mpoyi, Sweden/Kongo; 2022 Meerke Laimi Thomasson Vekterli, Norway; 2020 Anna Pajak, Sweden; 2017 Julie Ebbing, Norway; and 2015 Adam Saks, Denmark/Germany.
Alejandra Aguilar Caballero is a Mexican visual artist based in Oslo, Norway. Her practice moves fluidly between traditional printmaking, drawing, installation, and graphic narrative, creating distinctive storytelling approaches that explore personal and collective memory, identity, and everyday experience. She holds a BA in Visual Arts from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and an MFA in Medium and Material Based Art from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. She has received multiple grants in Mexico and Norway and has exhibited internationally across Europe and the Americas.
The jury is proud to present the QSPA Inspirational Award 2026 to Alejandra Aguilar Caballero, an artist distinguished by a coherent and unmistakably personal artistic expression. For Aguilar Caballero, printmaking is not only a technique but a way of thinking. Her practice combines meticulous attention to detail with the construction of complex spatial installations, informed by performative, theatrical, and narrative traditions.
Drawing on Latin American storytelling and its connections to magical realism, her work explores ideas of home, memory, and identity through a distinctive narrative language marked by clarity, dramatic tension, and precision. The jury highlights the maturity, individuality, and exploratory nature of her practice and looks forward to her continued development as an artist.
Award program in Oslo - September 2026
The Queen Sonja Print Award (QSPA) 2026, one of the leading awards for contemporary printmaking, will take place in September 2026 at the National Museum in Oslo. The award winners will travel to Oslo to receive their prizes. The biennial programme is anchored by three interconnected events: the Award Ceremony, an International Seminar on the state of contemporary printmaking, and an exhibition at the QSPA Exhibition Space in Bjørvika. Full programme to be announced.
The Award Ceremony is the centrepiece of the programme. The three QSPA awards; the Queen Sonja Print Award, the QSPA Inspirational Award, and the QSPA Lifetime Achievement Award, will be presented by Her Majesty Queen Sonja at a formal ceremony attended by artists, jury members, institutional representatives, invited international guests, press, and the public.
Photo credits:
Portrait of Tacita Dean in her studio in Berlin Photo: Royal Academy of Arts, London; ©A. K. Purkiss
Portrait of Judy Chicago, 2023. Photo © Chicago Woodman LLC, Donald Woodman/Artists Rights Society, New York
Portrait of Alejandra Aguilar Caballero. Photo: Enrique Guadarrama Solis