Turner Prize 2025 Shortlist Announced

Turner Prize 2025 Shortlist Announced

Tate Britain officials today named Nnena Kalu, Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami, and Zadie Xa as the four artistsshortlistedfor the forty-first annualTurner Prize. Work by the quartet will be on display at the Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford, England, from September 27, 2025, to February 22, 2026, with the winner of the prestigious conceptual art award announced at a December 9 ceremony in Bradford. The prize is attended by a £25,000 ($33,000) purse, with each runner-up awarded £10,000 ($13,000).

“The shortlist reflects the breadth of artistic practice today, from painting and sculpture to photography and installation, and each of the artists offers a unique way of viewing the world through personal experience and expression,” said Tate Britain director and Turner Prize jury chair Alex Farquharson in a statement. “On J. M. W. Turner’s 250th birthday, I’m delighted to see his spirit of innovation is still alive and well in contemporary British art today, and I look forward to an unmissable exhibition of their work in Bradford this autumn.”

All four artists shortlisted this year are based in London. Kalu, fifty-eight, who was born in Glasgow and has limited verbal communication capacity, is known for large-scale swirling abstract drawings and for hanging, cocoonlike sculptures made from materials including repurposed fabrics and VHS tape. The Peterborough, England–born Matić, at twenty-seven the youngest artist in the cohort, investigates themes of belonging and identity through photography, installation, and sound works and, recently, an assemblage of dolls. Sami, forty, was born in Baghdad and departed Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. He has gained renown for his massive landscape paintings evoking the horrors of war and forced migration. The Vancouver-born Xa, forty-one, draws on her Korean heritage to create immersive installations incorporating painting, sound, video, and performance, exploring such topics as diasporic identities and interspecies communication.

The Turner Prize was inaugurated in 1984 and is one of the best-known art honors in the world. Typically given to a British artist, it has frequently polarized public opinion around some of the pathbreaking work created by those nominated; in recent years, the prize has been derided as having lost its original edge, with some calling for it to be retired. The Guardian has already called this year’s shortlist the “soppiest ever,” while The Telegraph has acknowledged it as “respectable” and the New York Times has suggested that J. M. W. Turner, the laurel’s namesake, would have approved of it. Past winners include Anish Kapoor (1991), Damien Hirst (1995), and Steve McQueen (1999). Scottish artist Jasleen Kaur won last year, for her sculpture comprising an old Ford Escort atop which was draped an enormous hand-crocheted doily.