Paulina Emilia Aumayr

Highlight

We are pleased to announce that Paulina Aumayr has won the Main Prize of the STRABAG ART Award 2026.

Paulina Emilia Aumayr’s work explores the mechanisms of power and corporeality through a visual language that always stands on the threshold between intimacy and aggression: the skin as a boundary between inside and outside, as a site of touch and injury, of romantic tenderness and sexual threat. Aumayr’s painting makes violence felt, not just visible. Dogs with bared teeth appear repeatedly as ciphers of threatening masculinity. At the same time, her work is about certain bodies that endure and keep going until what feminist theorist Sara Ahmed calls “affective exhaustion.” Her series are thus shaped by repetition as resistance and exhaustion as a form of protest.

Paulina Emilia Aumayr (b. 2002) is an artist working in painting and text. She lives and works in Vienna and studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in Daniel Richter’s class. In 2026, she was awarded the Main Prize of the STRABAG ART Award. Her work has recently been presented at Frieze Seoul and Art Düsseldorf. She has taken part in the COLLECTA Residency in Shanghai. Her work is held in the STRABAG Collection, where she will have a solo exhibition in March 2027.