Awarded:
Karin Kneffel receives the German Catholics' Art and Culture Prize 2025
Karin Kneffel receives this year's “Art and Culture Prize of German Catholics.” The award will be presented on October 29, 2025, at the Kolumba Museum in Cologne by the chairman of the German Bishops' Conference, Bishop Dr. Georg Bätzing, and the president of the Central Committee of German Catholics, Dr. Irme Stetter-Karp.
Karin Kneffel is one of the most outstanding visual artists of our time. In its statement, the award jury praised the painter's “technical perfection,” which she nevertheless does not content herself with. Rather, her monumental, predominantly photorealistic paintings fascinate with their “differently refracted viewer perspectives,” in which “symbolism and realism, iconography and surface, art and life meet in a way that is as surprising as it is appealing.” Karin Kneffel lends her numerous animal portraits “a disturbing gaze. A gaze that seems to ask people how things are going in the world as our common home.”
Regarding Karin Kneffel's latest series of paintings, “Face of a Woman, Head of a Child,” the jury said: “Kneffel draws on the Christian iconography of Mary and the infant Jesus, while at the same time breaking with tradition. ... No veil, no halo. Kneffel gives them their own dignity; Mary and Jesus appear incognito, yet very present and approachable.”
Karin Kneffel is “a guarantor that visual art remains sensual,” according to the jury. Experiencing Kneffel's paintings means "standing in front of expansive canvases with impasto, luminous colors and being delighted by how physical and real painting is beyond AI and social media. Kneffel's brushstrokes embody bodies, her colors embody light, her compositions embody space, her content embodies premonitions of the greatest intensity," the jury emphasized.
Der Kunst- und Kulturpreis der deutschen Katholiken ist die höchste Auszeichnung der katholischen Kirche auf dem Kultursektor. Der mit 25.000 Euro dotierte Preis wird für herausragende künstlerische und kulturelle Leistungen vergeben. Mit dieser Stiftung leisten die Deutsche Bischofskonferenz und das Zentralkomitee der deutschen Katholiken (ZdK) einen Beitrag zur Förderung der Begegnung von Kirche und moderner Kultur.
Der Preis wird seit 1990 abwechselnd alle zwei bis vier Jahre in den Sparten Literatur, Architektur, Musik, Film, Bildende Kunst, Theater und Tanz verliehen; 2025 erfolgt die elfte Preisvergabe. Unter den bisherigen Preisträgerinnen und Preisträgern waren die Tänzerin und Choreografin Lia Rodrigues (2021), der Komponist Mark Andre (2017), der Schriftsteller Ralf Rothmann (2014) und der Architekt Peter Zumthor (2011).