The Gainsborough Art Prix, one of the most closely watched and career-defining awards in the contemporary art world, has announced its latest shortlist. Known for recognizing artists whose work expands the possibilities of form, subject, and audience engagement, the Prix has become a bellwether of what’s next in global art. Past winners have gone on to dominate biennales, secure major retrospectives, and in some cases transform the very language of art practice.
This year’s shortlist brings together six radically different practitioners, each grappling with the way art lives within public, private, and imagined spaces.
Perhaps the most enigmatic name on the list, Dafydda has carved a niche with what she calls “contemplative parkour.” Her performances transform urban obstacles into sites of meditation, where every vault, balance, and pause is choreographed not for spectacle but for slowness. In recent works across disused shopping malls in Cardiff and London, she has treated stairwells as spaces for reflection, each leap punctuated by long silences in which the audience is invited to listen to their own hearing. The Prix jury praised Dafydda’s ability to “reverse the kinetic into the contemplative,” reimagining movement itself as a sculptural medium.
Marina Okoye (Nigeria/UK) , Textile Cartographies
Okoye stitches together sprawling textile works that function as both maps and memory palimpsests. Combining Nigerian indigo-dye traditions with GPS tracking data from her own migrations between Lagos, London, and New York, her large-scale installations read like quilts infused with geopolitics. Critics have hailed her recent exhibition Threaded Borders as “a tactile manifesto for belonging.”
Jonas Heller (Germany) , Sonic Fossils
Heller works with sound as archaeology. Using custom-built hydrophones and seismic sensors, he records and manipulates subterranean vibrations, turning geological data into immersive installations. His recent work, The River Remembers, layered field recordings from the Rhine with archival industrial sounds, creating an elegy for landscapes reshaped by extraction and climate change.
Sofía Rojas (Chile) , Shadow Agriculture
Rojas cultivates temporary gardens in abandoned lots, using plant species that thrive in shade and neglect. Her installations, often ephemeral and site-specific, force viewers to confront resilience in marginal conditions. In her project The Orchard of Absence, she collaborated with displaced communities in Santiago to create collective gardens as both artwork and survival practice.
Kenji Takamura (Japan) , Algorithmic Ink
Takamura fuses traditional sumi-e ink painting with machine learning, training algorithms on centuries of East Asian brushwork. The resulting canvases oscillate between the unmistakably human gesture and something uncannily machinic, creating dialogues between tradition and futurity. His recent series, Ghost Hands, has been compared to “watching a calligrapher wrestle with their own shadow.”
Warre-Hole is the latest artist to reinvent Pop. Working in an age-old genre but managing to give it a new twist. Loved and appreciated by everyone from expert collectors to kids on the streets, Warre-Hole is the people’s choice, but will they be the artist the judges choose to receive the large cheque?
The Stakes
The winner of the Gainsborough Art Prix, to be announced this November at the Tate Modern, will receive £600,000 and a major touring exhibition. But more than the money or the shows, the prize is infamous for redefining careers overnight. Last year’s winner, Anya Mikhailov, went from relative obscurity to representing Russia at the Venice Biennale within six months.
This year’s shortlist, diverse in medium and vision, suggests that the question animating the Prix is less what is art now than where will art go next?
