Turner Prize 2025: ‘artistic excellence’ or ‘nonsense’?

Scottish artist Nnena Kalu scooped the top prize with her vibrant sculptures

(Image credit: David Levene)

The Turner Prize is “the cockroach of art”, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Established some 40 years ago, it has proved remarkably resilient: “however bad it gets, it survives the hammering and comes back for more”. This year’s iteration takes place at Bradford’s Cartwright Hall, and sees the award “up to its usual cultural nonsenses”. As ever, four artists from (or based in) the UK have been shortlisted: there’s the photographer Rene Matic, aged just 28; the Korean-Canadian multimedia artist Zadie Xa; the Iraqi-born painter Mohammed Sami; and Nnena Kalu, this year’s winner – a learning-disabled Scottish artist with severe autism.

Making an impact

Each gets a room in the gallery to present an emblematic selection of their work, the first of which comes courtesy of Matic. Mixed race, queer and nonbinary, Matic “complains continuously of feeling culturally divided”. Their room contains a lot of empty sloganeering and a display of “wonky” photos of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, gay marches and right-on graffiti. Whatever you feel about those causes, Matic doesn’t transform them “into good art”.

The artists in this year’s show certainly “know how to make a physical impact”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. A case in point is Xa, whose room feels “more like some psychedelic nightclub than an art display”, with a mirrored golden floor and soundscapes emanating from shells and tinkling bells. Amidst all this are her paintings, “hallucinatory compositions” that channel the shamanic traditions of her Korean heritage. In this vivid context, sadly, they look like “pieces of decorative scene-setting”.

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Sami’s much more traditional paintings, meanwhile, evoke the “traumas” of Iraqi history without resorting to the clichés of reportage. They’re eerie things: one “vast” canvas gives us “a blasted palm forest” through “a fog of orange dust”, a human presence hinted at by the green lines of military lasers. The mood is “‘Apocalypse Now’ via computer games, with a touch of Monet”. It is so thrilling that it makes the other artists feel “a shade superficial”.

‘Recognising artistic excellence’?

Sami should have won the prize, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. His “haunting” contemporary history paintings are like “half-remembered nightmares” of Iraq’s recent conflicts. They stand head and shoulders above Kalu’s efforts: namely, a number of “cocoon-like” abstract cultures hewn from materials such as fabric and VHS tape. They have “a festive, exuberant quality”, but there’s not much more to them. Her win is a milestone for disabled people, but a “maddening” decision nonetheless. Is the Turner, in the end, “about recognising artistic excellence or not”?

Comparisons between Kalu and the others “are not much help”, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. She has limited verbal communication; her works suggest “a constant flux between objects and space, herself and others”. Each sculpture is born of “drive and urgency and intent”; they are “so full of life and energy, you think they might burst”. She is a worthy winner.

Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford. Until 22 February