ARTnews Names "Horror" and "MONUMENTS" Among 2026 Award Winners
Two Los Angeles exhibitions have been named winners of the 2026 ARTnews Awards, the annual honours from the US art magazine ARTnews. The awards were announced on November 14, 2026.
The Best Gallery Group Show prize went to "Horror," a group show at Sprüth Magers, a commercial gallery in Los Angeles. A group show brings together work by several artists rather than one. ARTnews said the exhibition, curated by Jill Mulleady, ran from November 21, 2025 to February 14, 2026. It drew on paintings, sculptures, photographs and films spanning more than 50 years.
The list of artists includes recent works by Anne Imhof, Henry Taylor and Jordan Wolfson. The show also featured a recording by the French writer and performer Antonin Artaud, who died in 1948. ARTnews reported that the exhibition took its inspiration from "The Uncanny," a 1993 exhibition by the American artist Mike Kelley. The uncanny is a term for things that feel strangely familiar and unsettling at the same time.
The Best Thematic Museum Show award went to "MONUMENTS," which was shown at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and at The Brick, a nearby project space. The show ran from October 23, 2025 to May 3, 2026. It was curated by Hamza Walker, Kara Walker and Bennett Simpson, with Hannah Burstein and Paula Kroll.
"MONUMENTS" focused on Confederate monuments, the statues honouring leaders of the Confederacy, the breakaway southern states that fought the American Civil War. Many of these statues have been taken down in recent years. At MOCA, ARTnews said, the monuments stood on the gallery floor as sculptures, rather than raised on pedestals, and many still carried graffiti. Each was placed alongside work by contemporary artists, including Martin Puryear, Andres Serrano and Hank Willis Thomas.
At The Brick, Kara Walker showed her own piece, "Unmanned Drone" (2023). She made it by taking apart a decommissioned equestrian statue of the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson and welding it back together in fragments. The show's curators, the magazine said, placed the monuments in spaces usually reserved for contemporary art.
The awards jury also gave a Special Citation to the inaugural hang of the David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which opened on May 4. A citation is an honour that falls short of a top prize.
Other nominees in the group show category included "How Beautiful This Living Thing Is" at Ortuzar in New York, "Snake, Turtle, Alligator" at David Peter Francis in New York, "Statics of an Egg" at David Zwirner in New York, and "What We Hold On To" at Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum in Englewood, Colorado. In the museum category, the other nominees were "Into the Time Horizon" at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno and "If the word we: 59th Carnegie International" at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.
For anyone planning a visit, both winning shows have closed. "Horror" ended in February and "MONUMENTS" in May. The awards now mark the work that filled those galleries for months.
