Who Won the 2025 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize?

Kunimasa Aoki took home this year’s craftsmanship award.

Every year the Loewe Foundation hosts their annual Craft Prize. Created in 2016, it’s designed to highlight and champion newness, excellence and artistic merit in modern craftsmanship. This year was no different, with a selection of works that utilize ancient craft techniques like basketry or metal work coupled with modern materials. While some artists focus on their heritage and innovating traditions, others create their own path, offering a new direction with unique sculptural forms.

‘Realm of Living Things 19’ (2024) by Kunimasa Aoki

2025’s winner, selected by a  jury, composed of 12 leaders of the art, journalism, architecture and design industry, was Japanese artist Kunimasa Aoki. His piece Realm of Living (2024), chosen among 30 other finalists’ works, is an anamorphic terracotta sculpture which explores the ways in which material cracks and distorts when force is applied.The artist used innovative techniques that took advantage of the effects of time, gravity, and pressure. Layers of clay were stacked and compressed, smoked in the kiln, and finally coated with an additional finish of soil and pencil marks to create the finished product.

The jury also acknowledged two other artists with a special mention: Nigeria’s Nifemi Marcus-Bello for TM Bench with Bowl (2023) and India’s Studio Sumakshi Singh for Monument (2024). Marcus-Bello’s work consists of discarded aluminium sourced from the auto industry and explores the ideas of power, globalization and trade. The latter is a life-sized sculpture made from copper zari and threaded onto water-soluble fabric that was then dissolved, leaving only the thread behind. Created as a way to poetically juxtapose the strength of its presence and its delicate structure, the piece evokes the fragility of memory and the decomposing of physical monuments and artifacts. 

All 30 of the shortlisted works will be exhibited at Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid from 30 May until 29 June 2025. The exhibition is available to view online and will be documented in an exhibition catalogue. See some of the pieces below.

from left to right: AGNES HUSZ, DIDI NG WING YIN, ASPEN GOLANN, FANG LIANG, CECILE FEILCHENFELDT, MARIE ISABELLE POIRIER-TROYANO, NIFEMI MARCUS-BELLO, PHILIP EGLIN, SCOTT CHASELING, SUMAKSHI SINGH