In the rarefied sanctum of contemporary craft, where ancient techniques collide with radical intent, the 2025 LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize emerges as both archive and oracle. Hosted at Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, a citadel of visual memory, this year’s exhibition is a communion of hands, histories, and materials—earth and thread, metal and breath—each carrying whispers of the past and provocations for the future.
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- Winner: Kunimasa Aoki’s Realm of Living Things 19. Photography Courtesy of Loewe.
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- Winner: Kunimasa Aoki’s Realm of Living Things 19. Photography Courtesy of Loewe.
Winner: Kunimasa Aoki’s Realm of Living Things 19
Awarded €50,000, Japanese sculptor Kunimasa Aoki commands attention with Realm of Living Things 19, an anamorphic terracotta sculpture that eschews ornament for the sublime honesty of material fatigue. Like a tectonic memoir, Aoki’s work exposes the poetry of pressure—terracotta coils stacked, compressed, and risked to fire. Finished with soil and graphite, the surface forms what the jury poetically dubbed “little universes.” Here, failure is not just risked—it’s aestheticized. In a moment where digital perfection suffocates the organic, Aoki’s embrace of unpredictability and ancestral technique becomes a radical act of truth-telling.
Selected from over 4,600 submissions across 133 countries, Aoki’s sculpture was praised for its raw fidelity to the coil process, and its sculptural vulnerability. As juror Frida Escobedo noted, the piece “doesn’t perform craft—it lets craft breathe.”
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- Courtesy of Loewe.
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- Courtesy of Loewe.
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- Courtesy of Loewe.
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- Courtesy of Loewe.
Special Mentions: Global Materials, Local Myths
Two special mentions deepen the biennale’s conceptual terrain. Nifemi Marcus-Bello, from Lagos, Nigeria, is lauded for TM Bench with Bowl, a sculptural work in reclaimed automotive aluminum. A study in post-industrial poise, the bench maps globalization’s flows and frictions—trade, extraction, excess—rendered with the quiet gravity of minimal form. It’s a bench that holds not just bodies, but histories.
Equally spectral is Studio Sumakshi Singh’s Monument, a thread-ghost of a 12th-century Delhi column. Constructed in copper zari and then dissolved from its support, the resulting filigree speaks of resilience—monumentality without mass. In Singh’s hands, absence becomes monument. What remains is not just a work of art, but a memory that resists erosion.
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- Courtesy of Loewe.
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- Courtesy of Loewe.
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- Courtesy of Loewe.
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- Courtesy of Loewe.
Craft as Culture, Craft as Critique
Now in its eighth edition, the LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize has become a rare locus where the intellectual and the tactile cohabitate. Founded in 2016 to honor the house’s origins as a leather craft collective in 1846, the prize has become a benchmark for what the future of making might look like: speculative, slow, and stubbornly human.
The 2025 cohort stretches from ceramics to glass, lacquer to textiles, with 30 shortlisted works that twist tradition into new geometries. Some artists channel oral histories and ritual, while others conjure the fantastical. In each, the hand is evident—not as a romantic ideal, but as a reminder of labor, lineage, and touch in a world increasingly governed by smooth automation.
“The magic of the prize,” reflects Sheila Loewe, “is seeing craft’s continued capacity to surprise, innovate and evolve.” It’s not just about materials; it’s about mindsets.
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- Courtesy of Loewe.
Context is Craft
That the exhibition takes place in the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum—home to Dürer and Duchamp, Hopper and Kandinsky—only amplifies the proposition. These are not mere objects. They are arguments, staged among centuries of visual language. The Craft Prize doesn’t ask us to look back in reverence but forward with curatorial urgency.
As digital spectacle reaches saturation, the handmade reclaims power. Not as nostalgia, but as resistance—to disposability, to disconnection, to cultural amnesia. In the LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize, we find not only beautiful things, but the ideas, identities, and instabilities that make them urgent.
Craft, here, is no longer just a practice… It is a philosophy.
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- Courtesy of Loewe.
