STRABAG ART Award 2025: Haakon Neubert wins main prize - art prize celebrates its 30th anniversary

Haakon Neubert, who was born in Münster in 1994, has always been interested in comics, video games and pop culture, and you can see this in his work: Bright colors, hard contours, monochrome surfaces and an emphasis on the graphic in the painterly. Full of humor, absurd and deeply anchored in the everyday, he depicts ordinary scenes with figures that are often preoccupied with themselves, for example while shopping, playing sports, playing, working or eating. Neubert captures his initial pictorial ideas in quick drawings that he cuts out and then assembles the cut-outs into small narrative scenes. His works are about being alone, being together and being strange, says the artist, who studied at the Kunstakademie Münster from 2016 - 2024. High and low art combine in these works and provide an unadulterated insight into a reality of life that is characterized by great immediacy.

I think that the formal and the content are mutually dependent and cannot be separated from each other. The interplay of both components forms the narrative. In my case, this means combining everyday scenes with my painting. I spent a long time thinking about why I paint until I realized that this was the wrong question. The right question is: Who am I painting for? And they are people, so I show them.

In my opinion, art and construction have a few things in common - if you think of the architecture of a bridge or other architectural masterpieces! Art has a high priority at STRABAG - in our buildings and in our Group buildings throughout Europe. For almost four decades, contemporary works of art have enriched our everyday working life. The STRABAG Art Forum, founded by Hans Peter Haselsteiner and Wilhelm Weiß, contributes to promoting creativity, opening up new perspectives and strengthening our corporate culture with consistency, a high understanding of art and, above all, a great deal of passion. The ongoing and consistent development of the activities of our art team now reaches a new stage on June 26, 2025: STRABAG Kunstforum becomes STRABAG ART. Congratulations to Sebastian Haselsteiner and his fantastic team on 30 years of the STRABAG ART Award! Good luck with STRABAG ART!

When we awarded the first regional art prize in Carinthia in 1994, nobody would have dared to think that we would be celebrating its 30th anniversary and at the same time be able to look back on such a continuous and remarkable development.

With the transformation of the STRABAG Kunstforum to STRABAG ART, STRABAG SE is positioning itself not only as a promoter of young and contemporary art, but also as an innovative cultural player that is breaking new ground in linking art, architecture and the world of work. The new appearance shows that art is not just an accompanying program, but an integral part of STRABAG SE's corporate identity and social commitment.
The renaming of the STRABAG Art Forum to STRABAG ART is also not a new invention, but the continuation of an idea that has been inherent in our everyday work since 2005. STRABAG inherently contains art - and this is reflected in our new visual identity