Promoting young artists is very important to us. With this in mind, we give talented art college students the opportunity to exhibit their work in a gallery for the first time, thereby offering them an entrée into the art world. This is why GALERIE VON&VON created the PLAYGROUND art prize. Since 2016, our annual PLAYGROUND exhibition series has given young artists the chance to showcase their work to a broader audience and establish initial connections within the art world. We intend to continue this project, as it establishes connections between young, emerging artists and the art market. Previously, the PLAYGROUND ART PRIZE has enabled artists to establish long-term networks, resulting in further exhibitions and participation in art fairs. The winners will be showcased in a group exhibition at the gallery from 3 July to 23 August 2025.
Winners:
- 1st prize: Anima Goyal / Städelschule Frankfurt
- 2nd prize: Gamze Palabiyik / Düsseldorf Art Academy
- 3rd prize: Aaron Nora Kappenberger / Düsseldorf Art Academy
Jury:
- Saskia Höfler Hohengarten (Director & Creative Director KUBAPARIS)
- Franziska Linhardt (Curator, Museum Brandhorst Munich)
- Mahret Ifeoma Kupka (Curator, Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main)
Anima Goyal's work focuses on the connection between chronic illness in the human body and the continuous decay in the bodies of old dolls. Last year, she worked with Eri and Muga silk - spun by a silkworm that cannot be domesticated despite many attempts. She found parallels between the fleeting life cycle of these insects and the self-developed pain cycles of chronically ill bodies. The experience of being mistranslated in poetic practices overlaps with the experience of misdiagnosis in medical contexts - both involve a displaced linguistic and diseased body that is constantly in negotiation with time and waiting to be understood.
In her artistic practice, Gamze Palabiyik explores themes of fragility and physicality, as well as the tensions between tenderness and hardness, and intimacy and demarcation. She predominantly works sculpturally, often using materials that carry their own stories of vulnerability or resistance, such as metal, wax, fabric and hair. A central focus of her work is social notions of femininity and associated aspects of performance, desire and pain. She views the body as a place where social norms, aesthetics, and political structures are inscribed — often subtly yet pervasively. Her works are characterised by moments of discomfort and absurdity, and a deviation from expectation. She is interested in both forms of adherence and discipline and forms of resistance.
Aaron Nora Kappenberger subverts socially dominant ideas by appropriating them and visualising them from a queer perspective, thereby softening and re-evaluating social narratives on class, gender and sexuality. One example of this is their performance interventions, in which they use wooden masks from the Swabian-Alemannic carnival to transfer traditiona representations of monsters into queer contexts. Both the mask and the person wearing it act as projection surfaces and projectors. This enables the audience to compare their perception of queerness with the subjective reality of the depicted figures: the queer gaze.
Three established artists from the Düsseldorf Art Academy — Mahssa Askari, Laura Aberham and Yijie Gong — complement the young perspectives with their powerful use of colour and their experimental interplay of classical painting techniques with contemporary expression.
