Carrie Yamaoka

The Hamburger Kunsthalle is presenting the first solo exhibition in Germany devoted to the artist Carrie Yamaoka (b. 1957). The occasion for the show in the atrium of the Galerie der Gegenwart is the awarding of the Maria Lassnig Prize to the New York-based, multidisciplinary artist. Yamaoka’s interest in mutable materials and surfaces has given rise to works that often combine photography with text panels and reflective image supports. Chemical processes and fleeting transformations also play an important role in her work as she investigates the possibilities available for recording and documentation. Sometimes the artist revisits her earlier works after a few years and alters them, thus challenging the standard chronological development of an artistic oeuvre. The mirror-like surfaces of works that oscillate between painting, photography and sculpture cause space, light and viewers to intermingle in constantly changing perspectives and mani-festations. 

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Carrie Yamaoka works across a range of media including painting, drawing, sculpture and photography. She is interested in the topography of surfaces, materiality and process, the tactility of the barely visible and the chain of planned and chance incidents that determine the outcome of the object. She embraces error and defect, the slippage of material protocols, negotiations with chance and the trajectories that follow from breaking the rules of process. Her work engages the viewer at the intersection between records of chemical action/reaction and the desire to apprehend a picture emerging in fleeting and unstable states of transformation. Yamaoka has exhibited widely in the US and abroad: at MOMA/PS1, Centre Pompidou, the ICA Philadelphia, Mori Art Museum, the Venice Biennale, the Henry, Artists Space, Wexner Center, Palais de Tokyo, Bronx Museum, Hamburg Kunsthalle, Participant Inc., MassMOCA, among other venues. Her work is included in the collections of the Buffalo AKG, Centre Pompidou, Victoria and Albert Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum. Yamaoka has received an Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2017), a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2019), the Maria Lassnig Prize (2025) and a NYC Artadia Award (2026). Her work has been written about in Artforum, the New York Times, Bomb, Art in America, Artnews, Interview and Hyperallergic. A monograph, RE: Carrie Yamaoka, was published by Radius Books in 2025. She is also committed to collaborative/collective work and is a founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy. Yamaoka is based in New York and is part-time faculty in the Art Media and Technology Department at Parsons. 

Curator

• Dr. Brigitte Kölle (Director & Exhibition Curator for Contemporary Art)

Assistant Curator

• Michelle Adler