The 2025 Turner Prize shortlist has been announced – and there's one clear favourite

Telegraph

23-04-2025

Last year, when the Turner Prize turned 40, there were calls for it to be retired. While they were excessive – the 2024 edition was hardly egregious, and I relished the energy provided by the winner, Jasleen Kaur – there is a legitimate sense that the annual, £25,000 award is in the doldrums of a midlife crisis, and nowadays attracts mostly lukewarm enthusiasm, or, worse, indifference.
This year's shortlist – announced on April 23, the 250th birthday of the radical British artist, JMW Turner (after whom the prize is named) – may not allay such concerns. It's respectable and hard to fault, rather than controversial. And, with four artists nominated for far-flung shows and presentations in Barcelona, Sharjah, Berlin, and (unusually, for an award supposedly celebrating contemporary art's cutting edge) at Blenheim Palace, the 18th-century Oxfordshire seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, I worry that it may reflect a view you often hear these days: that London's pre-eminence as an international centre for contemporary art has dissipated.
Chosen for After the Storm, a first-rate show at Blenheim dealing with war's spectral repercussions, the 40-year-old, Iraqi-born, London-based painter Mohammed Sami is the frontrunner; he'd be a popular winner, too, given that, as an artist, he so clearly operates within the tradition of Western European painting. His inclusion this year also makes up for the fact that he was short-changed last time around, when he should have been nominated for another brilliant solo exhibition, at Camden Art Centre in 2023.
When, though, push comes to shove, and it's time to select a winner, will he seem like an unduly conservative choice to the curators on the jury, who may pride themselves on being more avant-garde in their tastes? The surreal paintings of the 41-year-old Canadian-born Zadie Xa – who also produces fabric pieces inspired by the patchwork aesthetic of traditional Korean textiles, in homage to her heritage – are less sad and wistful, and, in a sense, more 'now'.
As a 'nonverbal' artist, the 58-year-old Glaswegian-born Nnena Kalu – nominated for an installation of exuberant suspended sculptures at a biennial in Barcelona, as well as a presentation of swirling graphic works that were shown in Liverpool – will attract attention. She also extends a trend since the prize was expanded in 2017 (to include artists over the age of 50) to nominate older, and previously overlooked, black female artists – including two, in Lubaina Himid and Veronica Ryan, who went on to win. Yet, it would be unfair to describe Kalu's inclusion as a box-ticking exercise, given the bold, beguiling energy of her work.
Which leaves 27-year-old Rene Matić, who's about to open a show of new work at London's Arcadia Missa gallery. They (Matić's preferred pronoun) were a rare ray of excellence and hope illuminating Tate Britain's otherwise benighted rehang of its permanent display in 2023. While their photography may be in thrall to that of a former Turner Prize-winner, Wolfgang Tillmans, it has a mesmerising, frisky informality, and electrifying grasp of the effects of colour. I'll be delighted if they carry off the prize, if Sami doesn't bag it.