The Nasher Sculpture Center announces Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj as the 2027 Nasher Prize Laureate, becoming the ninth and youngest artist to receive the award.
Halilaj joins this distinguished lineage with a practice that poignantly explores identity, history, and belonging through sculpture’s evolving language.
In accordance with the artist’s wishes, the $100,000 prize will be donated to Hajde! Foundation, the Kosovo-based nonprofit Halilaj and his sister, curator Hana Halilaj, founded in 2014 to create spaces and opportunities for Kosovar artists. One of its most ambitious projects is the revitalization of the House of Culture in Runik, Kosovo, a former community arts center in the town where Halilaj spent much of his childhood, which was profoundly affected by war.
Halilaj’s ability to transform drawing into sculpture is among his most remarkable achievements. For The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2024 Roof Garden Commission titled Abetare, the artist revisited a 2015 project of the same name, recording thousands of drawings from children’s school desks, spanning generations of graffiti from schools—initially from Kosovo, then from throughout the Balkans—for the Met commission where he transformed them into stainless and bronze sculptures. In these works, Halilaj invokes the imaginative reach of childhood vision and memory, ranging from the frightening to the comforting, magnifying school day doodles into markers of history, culture, and universality.
The Nasher Prize has emerged as one of the most significant honors in contemporary sculpture, celebrating artists whose work has expanded and reshaped the possibilities of the medium. Over the past decade, its laureates have continually pushed the boundaries of material and form, investigating what sculpture can be and how it can address contemporary life.
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