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Rene Matić, whose work unpicks modern British identity and has been described as “the Wolfgang Tillmans of their generation”, has won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation prize 2026.
The Peterborough-born photographer was awarded the £30,000 prize, which is among the most prestigious art awards in Europe, after being nominated alongside Jane Evelyn Atwood, Weronika Gęsicka and Amak Mahmoodian.
Matić, who was also selected for the Turner prize in 2025, was recognised for their exhibition at CCA in Berlin, titled As Opposed to the Truth, which documented queer love, nationalism and various subcultures.
“Opposing layers. Loving layers. Violent layers,” is how Matić described the exhibition, which featured photographs, flags with slogans sewn on them and their collection of black dolls from second-hand stores.
Shoair Mavlian, the director of the Photographers’ Gallery and chair of the Deutsche Börse jury, said Matić’s use of “photography in a fluid and experimental way” had impressed the judging panel.
She added: “The installation’s construction, where different dialogues are created through the pairing and reorganising of the images was something we thought was really exciting and interesting.”
“Symbolism does a lot of the work for me,” Matić once said about their work. “The exploration of blessing and burden, and of true or false. I use flags as a metaphor for power and hegemony.”
As Opposed to the Truth was the first institutional solo exhibition that Matić has had in Germany, but she’s exhibited widely in the UK and across Europe, including a joint show with Oscar Murillo at Kunsthalle Wien in Austria, where their work was inspired by Josephine Baker.
Matić has had the far-right slogan “Born British Die British” tattooed on their back after being inspired by the photography of Derek Ridgers, who documented the fascist scene of 1970s Britain. Matić’s work is often inspired by subcultural movements from the skinhead movement their father was part of in the 1980s, to Northern Soul.
“[The tattoo] was always about the in-between moments of being born British and dying British,” Matić once said. “That’s what my story is all about.”
“I wanted to insert myself into that narrative. I came across Derek’s photos [of skinheads] when I was younger. I think I was searching for myself, or my dad, in that scene. His work was instrumental in me understanding my culture, identity and position – and opposition.”
Their Turner Prize nominated work was described by Adrian Searle: “Peace and protest, friendship and family are all mixed together, along with contested ideas of nationhood and belonging … It all adds up to a frozen autobiographical tableau.”
They had also been called “a quiet observer of things,” he wrote.
Evelyn Atwood was nominated for her book Too Much Time, a decade-long survey capturing the lives of women in prison, spanning death row in America to female inmates in eastern Europe.
The Iranian photographer Mahmoodian was nominated for One Hundred and Twenty Minutes, which refers to the amount of time humans spend dreaming every night – with a particular focus on the dreams of immigrants seeking to forge a new life.
Polish artist Gęsicka was recognised for her fact-meets-fiction work Encyclopedia, which created fake entries via generative AI inspired by real-life falsehoods contained in reference books.
It was the first work that used AI ever to be nominated for the award and comes at a time when artists have encouraged the industry to embrace the technology.
Mavlian said: “We can’t escape the fact that artists will use it in different and creative ways. It is definitely a huge topic of conversation for photographers at the moment and quite rightly.”
All of the nominated artists received £5,000.
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