Cornelia Sollfrank has been awarded the HAP Grieshaber Prize 2025
Published on April 9, 2025, by Jenny Fleischer at kunstfonds.de
Cornelia Sollfrank, //OG flowers// – 100 NFTs aus der Serie anonymous_warhol-flowers, NfTNeTArT – From Net Art to Art NFT, panke.gallery und Office IMPART, Berlin (2022)
The jury of the Stiftung Kunstfonds has awarded the “HAP Grieshaber Prize of VG Bild-Kunst”, endowed with 25,000 euros, to the artist Cornelia Sollfrank for her outstanding artistic achievement.
Cornelia Sollfrank (Berlin) is a visual artist, researcher and lecturer. Since the 1990s, she has been working with digital media and the paradigm shift that this entails in aesthetic practice and theory. Recurring themes in her work include critical authorship, new forms of (political) self-organization, artistic infrastructures and techno-feminism. With her numerous artistic projects and interventions, often realized within the framework of (techno-)feminist collectives, as well as her work in research and teaching, Sollfrank has earned herself a reputation as a pioneer of net art. In 1997, Sollfrank was one of the founders of the Old Boys Network (https://obn.org), in which female artists and researchers experimented with network structures and dealt with the articulation and implementation of cyberfeminism. The network organized several international conferences, the first of which took place as part of documenta X in Kassel. In 1999, Sollfrank also collaborated with programmers to create the net.art generator, which produces network art – collages of images available on the Internet – according to the ironically critical slogan “A smart artist makes the machine do the work” and supposedly turns every user into an artist. In her work cycle THIS IS NOT BY ME from the 2000s, Sollfrank explored originality and copyright in the digital world using the Andy Warhol work “Flowers”, thus anticipating questions of generative art that are being discussed again in the age of artificial intelligence. The multi-part work has been presented in exhibitions in Europe, Asia and North America.
Cornelia Sollfrank (*1960) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts der Munich and fine art at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg. Since 1998, she has taught at various international universities and art academies, conducted autonomous and institutional research and published on topics at the interface of art, technology and (gender) politics. In 2011, Sollfrank completed her practice-led research at the University of Dundee (UK) and published her dissertation “Performing the Paradoxes of Intellectual Property”. She has been involved in the technofeminist network #purplenoise since 2018. Sollfrank's art has most recently been shown in solo and group exhibitions at Studio XX in Montréal (2017), the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) Karlsruhe (2022), the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2023), the Frauenmuseum Bonn (2024) and the Cooper Gallery Dundee, Scotland (2025). Further information about the artist: https://artwarez.org
By awarding the prize named after the painter and woodcutter HAP Grieshaber, VG Bild-Kunst is honoring an artist who was instrumental in the initiative to establish the German collecting society VG Bild-Kunst. Grieshaber had been extraordinarily committed to the copyrights of visual artists since the 1970s and had also vehemently advocated the expansion of social security for artists. The funding for the HAP Grieshaber Prize is provided by the Stiftung Kulturwerk of VG Bild-Kunst. They come from the proceeds that VG Bild-Kunst generates from the management of the copyrights of visual artists. The prize money is a recognition from artists for artists.