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Nnena Kalu has been awarded the 2025 Turner Prize for what the jury described as her “bold and compelling work” across sculpture and drawing.
Glasgow-born Kalu, 59, was announced as the winner of Britain’s best-known visual arts prize at a ceremony on Tuesday in Bradford, which is in its final weeks as UK City of Culture.
The jury, chaired by Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson, praised Kalu’s “lively translation of expressive gesture into captivating abstract sculpture and drawing” and “her distinct practice and finesse of scale, composition and colour”.
Kalu creates large hanging cocoon-like sculptures from materials such as rope, fabric and VHS tape, as well as bright “vortex” drawings that consist of swirling, overlapping lines in pen, pencil and pastels.
She has limited verbal communication and has been a member of ActionSpace, an organisation that supports learning-disabled artists across London, since 1999.
Farquharson told the Financial Times that Kalu’s work “lured you in” with its “profound, joyful, certainly very expressive abstract qualities” and that the jury felt “really proud to be part of the acclaim she is receiving”.
Past winners of the £25,000 prize, which is awarded each year to an artist born or based in Britain, include sculptors Sir Anish Kapoor and Dame Rachel Whiteread, painter Lubaina Himid and film director Sir Steve McQueen.
The three other nominees this year — Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami and Zadie Xa — received £10,000 each.
The award is named after JMW Turner, the English Romantic painter, and was established in 1984 to “promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art”.
Turner, known for his technical and thematic experimentation, was born in London in 1775, and events and exhibitions have been put on across the country to mark his 250th birthday.
Farquharson, whose gallery is now home to most of Turner’s paintings, said the late artist “was always future-facing, and I think that the Turner Prize has lived up to being named after him . . . That spirit of innovation continues through the prize.”
Alongside Farquharson, this year’s judges were independent curator Andrew Bonacina, Liverpool Biennial director Sam Lackey, Priyesh Mistry, associate curator of modern and contemporary projects at the National Gallery, and Habda Rashid, senior curator of modern and contemporary art at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
The works by Kalu, Matić, Sami and Xa will be on show at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery until February 2026. But Tuesday’s ceremony was one of the last major events in the programme for Bradford’s year as City of Culture, which has shone a light on the artistic heritage of the northern English city and its local region.
Bradford’s sons and daughters include the 19th-century novelists Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë and the contemporary painter David Hockney. In 2009 it was named the world’s first Unesco city of film.
Shanaz Gulzar, creative director of Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, said 12 months of performances, exhibitions and other events had “given this city and district an opportunity to really find its voice in creativity and culture”.
Next year the Turner Prize will be presented at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, part of Teesside University.
Meanwhile, bidding is under way for cities to be named the fifth City of Culture in 2029 after Londonderry, also known as Derry, Hull, Coventry and Bradford. The title is enjoyed by a city every four years.
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