Installation artist Matej Bosnic has been awarded the 2026 Bonner Kunstpreis, the €10,000 prize presented by the city of Bonn, selected from 30 applications.

The award includes an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bonn in 2027 and a travel stipend. Bosnic, who studied at the Split Academy of Art with Viktor Popovic and as a Meisterschüler of Thomas Rentmeister in Braunschweig, is known for subtle, site-specific interventions that create atmospheres of fragility and mystery — a quality the jury singled out in its decision.

For his Bonn project, Bosnic plans to work in Brussels on the Marais Wiels, a wetland biotope in the Anderlecht district. The site has an unlikely origin: in 2007, a construction pit was left to fill with water, and over nearly two decades the accidental wetland matured into an unexpectedly rich habitat. A planned housing development on the site was averted this year, and the marsh is now set to become a protected regional park — a trajectory from error to sanctuary that mirrors Bosnic's interest in places caught between neglect and care.

The jury praised his ability to make such overlooked landscapes perceptible through minimal means. Bosnic's planned work at the marsh continues a practice of engaging with transitional terrain, using the lightest of interventions to reveal the histories and ecologies a place holds.

The 2027 Kunstmuseum Bonn exhibition will give Bosnic's minimal, site-responsive practice its most prominent institutional platform yet. The €10,000 prize and the travel stipend recognize an artist who works through near-invisible gestures — interventions that ask viewers to slow down and notice what neglect has preserved.