Xie Lei Awarded 2025 Prix Marcel Duchamp
67Oct. 27, 2025
Franco-Chinese painterXie Lei, known for his dreamlike portraits of ghostly, ambiguous figures adrift in dark spaces, has been announced as the winner of this year’sPrix Marcel Duchamp, France’s most prestigious contemporary art prize. The honor, presented annually by the Association for the International Diffusion of French Art to an artist who is French or living in France, is accompanied by a €35,000 ($38,000) purse. Xie Lei will also receive a residency at renowned porcelain factory and museum Sèvres – Manufacture et Musée Nationaux.
Born in 1983 in Huainan, China, Xie Lei lives and works in Paris. After earning his bachelor’s degree from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, he earned his master’s and his Ph.D. at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He also completed the painting research program at London’s Royal College of Art. Xie Lei is equally influenced by the work of painters Eugène Delacroix, Francisco Goya, and Diego Velázquez and by that of psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva and Chinese writers Zhuang Zhou and Pu Songling. In works ranging from the intimately scaled to the monumental, he refutes the use of live models to create his portraits, preferring instead to rely on memory. “My subjects are chimeras, combinations of elements drawn from my memory. Banal scenes where something extraordinary always happens,” he toldArt Baselearlier this year. His contribution to the Prix Marcel Duchamp comprises seven massive canvases containing surreal figures bathed in a phosphorescent green.
Xie Lei beat out a short list that included Bianca Bondi, Eva Nielsen, and Lionel Sabatté. Previous recipients of the award, which was established in 2000, include Kader Attia, Gaëlle Choisne, Latifa Echakhch, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Thomas Hirschhorn, Kapwani Kiwanga, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, and Tarik Kiswanson. An exhibition of work by Xie Lei and this year’s finalists curated by Julia Garimorth and Jean-Pierre Criqui is on view at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, through February 22, 2026.