ROTTERDAM, 10 October 2026 – Kunsthal Rotterdam has won the Museumtijdschrift Exhibition Award 2026 for Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses. The exhibition, which drew a record 281,000 visitors before closing in March, won the annual public vote by a wide margin.
Public vote puts Kunsthal on top
The winner was announced on Wednesday 7 October at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. An expert jury had first selected ten exhibitions from the past cultural year, after which the public was invited to vote for its favourite.
Kunsthal's Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses ultimately came out on top. The award comes with a €10,000 cash prize for the winning museum.
It is the second time in three years that Kunsthal Rotterdam has won the prize. The museum also took the Museumtijdschrift Exhibition Award in 2024 with Ai Weiwei. In Search of Humanity.
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A record-breaking Rotterdam exhibition
Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses ran at Kunsthal Rotterdam from 27 September 2025 until 1 March 2026 and attracted 281,000 visitors, setting a new attendance record for the Kunsthal.
The exhibition presented more than one hundred creations by Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen, bringing haute couture into conversation with contemporary art, design and science.
Van Herpen, born in 1984, has built an international reputation through work that repeatedly pushes at the boundaries between fashion, technology and sculpture. The Rotterdam exhibition approached that practice as an immersive journey rather than a conventional fashion retrospective.
Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses at Kunsthal Rotterdam. Photo: Ossip van Duivenbode.
Fashion, science and sculpture
The exhibition brought together elaborate garments, installations and visual references that showed how Van Herpen draws on subjects including biology, architecture, movement and new production techniques.
Her work often combines traditional craftsmanship with experimental technologies, resulting in pieces that can resemble organisms, skeletons, waves or structures from an imagined underwater world.
That combination of spectacle and research helped turn Sculpting the Senses into one of Kunsthal's most popular exhibitions to date.
The exhibition was organised by Kunsthal Rotterdam in close collaboration with the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and Atelier Iris van Herpen, and was based on the original exhibition conceived by the Paris museum.
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'We are proud to have realised this together'
Kunsthal director Marianne Splint said the award carried extra meaning because both the professional jury and the public had embraced the exhibition.
“As Kunsthal, we strive to create exhibitions that continually stimulate, surprise and engage a wide range of audiences. The fact that this exhibition has been recognised with this award not only by the professional jury, but also by our visitors, makes the appreciation all the more special. On behalf of all our colleagues at Kunsthal, as well as the many partners who contributed to the exhibition, I would like to express our sincere gratitude. We are proud to have realised this together.”
How the Exhibition Award works
The Museumtijdschrift Exhibition Award is an annual public prize recognising the best exhibition of the cultural year.
For the 2026 edition, the expert jury consisted of Hester Alberdingk Thijm, director of the AkzoNobel Art Foundation; Peter van Duinen, director of the Vrije Academie; and Jeroen Junte, editor-in-chief of Museumtijdschrift.
The jury selected ten nominated exhibitions before opening the final decision to the public.
With its victory in 2026, Kunsthal Rotterdam adds another national award to an exhibition that had already become a major audience success.
