Young European Artist Trieste Contemporanea Award 2025
the winner is Martin Sommer
Martin Sommer, F.L.A.V., 2023, lampada fluorescente riempita con gas estratto dall’aria di un caveau, cm 240x10x10. Ritratto dell’artista (per gentile concessione dell’artista)
The call for the Young European Artist Trieste Contemporanea Award received 258 eligible applications from artists under the age of thirty, coming from 23 countries.
The jury of the Award, composed of Paolo Bolpagni (director of the Fondazione Ragghianti, Lucca), Giuliana Carbi (Trieste Contemporanea), Francesco Mauro (historian, Trieste), Vladimir Nikolić (artist and director, Belgrade) and Helmutas Šabasevičius (art critic, Vilnius), met on Wednesday 23 July 2025 to review the submissions.
We are pleased to announce that the winner of the 2025 edition of the Award is: Martin Sommer (1998, Graz) who will thus open his solo exhibition in Trieste at Studio Tommaseo in December 2025, curated by Alice Debianchi.
Sommer’s artistic practice examines materials and institutional orders, focusing on the conditions under which something becomes visible, legible or meaningful. The starting point is functional material – remnants of infrastructural systems, standardized supports that have lost their operative function but still bear traces of their original inscription. Through targeted transformations, these materials are transferred into constellations that do not form autonomous objects but generate shifts. These are precise interventions that destabilize the familiar without negating it. In their structure, the works often follow existing institutional logics in spatial, formal or functional terms, and in doing so make their constructed nature visible. At the core lies the question of how institutional systems produce evidence through repetition, framing and omission. Visibility is not treated as given but understood as the result of historical and operative configurations. The works function as interventions into these configurations, not as countermodels but as movements within an order that render their boundaries perceptible. What emerges are states of productive instability. Objects and arrangements are neither autonomous nor clearly readable but instead open up relations between material, function, context and viewer. Artistic form, in this sense, is not an end in itself but a method of inquiry.
Martin Sommer (1998, Graz, A) lives and works in Vienna. He studied at the HTBLVA Graz-Ortweinschule (2013-2018) with a focus on classical sculpture and restoration. He studied in the “Sculpture and Space” programme at the Institute of Fine Arts & Media Art of the University of Applied Arts Vienna (2019-2025) and subsequently at the Royal College of Art in London (2023).
His artistic practice examines structures of perception and their stabilization through minimal, precise interventions in sculpture, installation, photography and film.
His work has been shown in Europe, Africa, and the USA. Recently, after participating in the 2024 Galerie Krinziger’s Artists in Residence programme, his work was presented by the Austrian gallery in the Kabinett section of Art Basel 2025.
The YEATCA 2025 Award is organized with the support of the Autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia and is part of the official programme of GO!2025 & Friends, the cultural programme of the European Capital of Culture Nova Gorica-Gorizia 2025.
The Young European Artist Trieste Contemporanea Award is awarded, since 1999, every two years to artists under the age of thirty from Central and Eastern Europe whose research has distinguished itself for its particular significance. The Award gives the artist the opportunity to conceive an unprecedented exhibition project as well as to document it with a publication.
Go to the previous editions of YEATCA Award.