Four artists make 25000 pounds Turner Prize list
Tate Britain has unveiled four artists shortlisted for its 41st Turner Prize, the top award available to British artists annually. The nominees—Simeon Barclay, Kira Frieje, Marguerite Humeau, and Tanoa Sasraku—will
Tate Britain has unveiled four artists shortlisted for its 41st Turner Prize, the top award available to British artists annually.
The nominees—Simeon Barclay, Kira Frieje, Marguerite Humeau, and Tanoa Sasraku—will all appear in this year’s Turner Prize exhibition at Teesside University’s Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), on view September 26, 2026 through March 29, 2027.
In 1998, Nigerian-British painter, Chris Ofili won the prestigious Turner Prize becoming the first Black artist and the first painter since 1985 to win the award.
His winning display included No Woman, No Cry (1998), a politically charged work which also references the murder of Stephen Lawrence, and Double Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars (1997).
“We all look forward to working with the artists over the coming months,” MIMA director Laura Sillars said in today’s announcement. “As the first Turner Prize within a university setting, this moment creates a special context where contemporary art can inspire discussion, dialogue and new ways of thinking.”
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Roberts Institute of Arts presents Simeon Barclay, The Ruin at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in January 2025. Photo © Anne Tetzlaff, courtesy of the Artist & Workplace
A jury of four British art professionals from the South London Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the Whitworth, and the Arts Council Collection selected this year’s candidates, per usual, based on showcases staged over the past year. Each artist is already guaranteed £10,000 ($13,400). But, the jury will also announce a single winner on December 10, based on both the work that got them nominated and their contribution to the annual exhibition, as of 2017. That awardee will receive an additional £15,000 ($20,200)—and entry into the acclaimed pantheon alongside previous winners like Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor.
Recent Turner Prize shortlists have featured themes like social structures and freedom. “This year’s selection presents a rich and diverse range of work, spanning installation and performance, and with a strong emphasis on sculptural practice,” Alex Farquharson, Tate Britain director and Turner Prize jury chairperson, added today. Indeed, not a single pure painter appears. Instead, “each artist invites us into carefully constructed scenarios, both real and imagined, that offer distinct perspectives through which to explore the world around us, and to reflect on our place within it,” Farquharson said.
This year’s jury selected the 51-year-old, Huddersfield-born and Leeds-based Barclay for his debut performance, The Ruin (2025), commissioned by the buzzy London-based Roberts Institute of Art. Although Barclay is best known for bringing boulders into sculpture parks, inflatables into art galleries, and neon into picture planes, The Ruin pairs a 60-minute monologue inspired by his industrial upbringing with live percussion. The resulting extravaganza explores “Britishness, class, race, and masculine identity,” according to Tate.
The 41-year-old London-born Frieje was chosen after the jury witnessed the “emotional depth” of her debut solo show “Unspeak the Chorus,” which is on view at the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire through May 4. There, Frieje has stationed 20 life-sized, metallic humanoid sculptures featuring casts of her hands and feet, and the faces of her friends, to simulate open-ended, universal narratives.
The ecologically driven 39-year-old French-born and London-based artist Humeau made this year’s cut courtesy of “Torches,” which opened at Copenhagen’s renowned ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art last spring before traveling to the Helsinki Art Museum last autumn. This operatic and immersive sculpture show impressed jurors with its cinematic atmosphere, as well as its “inventive forms, speculative scenarios and dynamic shifts in scale,” Tate said.
Also, the jury selected rising talent and market darling Sasraku, a 30-year-old Plymouth-born and London-based sculptor for her solo show “Morale Patch” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London this past winter. The presentation, which included works on paper, precisely arranged sculptures, and film, told the “recent political and military histories of oil,” Tate said, through a corporate-influenced conceptual language. The show bridged past and present through “a clinical, minimalist display that conveyed both irony and seriousness,” Tate added.
The Turner Prize exhibition is on view at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Centre Square, Middlesbrough, September 26, 2026–March 29, 2027.
