With Christian Retschlag as the 2023 Sprengel Prize winner, the SPRENGEL PRIZE continues to pursue the new direction it has been taking since 2021. Initiated in 1979 by Bernhard and Margrit Sprengel and taken over by the Nieders? chsische Sparkassenstiftung as its sponsor in 1991, the Sprengel Prize has been jointly funded and organised by the Nieders? chsische Sparkassenstiftung and the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture since 2021. Its realignment has been associated not only with a significant increase in funding, but above all with the linking of the prize to a travel scholarship within Europe and to an exhibition in the Sprengel Museum Hannover with a catalogue. Against the background of a rich and long history of intensive international cultural exchange, the travel scholarship as part of the prize and exhibition concept is being awarded in view of Lower Saxony's firm place in a Europe with its specific conception of a democratic and liberal social order.