The Loewe Foundation has announced the shortlist for the ninth edition of its annual Craft Prize. The prize has consistently shown the public some of the most innovative work by artists in craft. While teasing out an over-arching theme among works that include blown glass, lacquered leather and beaded quilts might be a fool’s game, there is clearly an interest in balance – structurally as well as aesthetically – in many of these works; nowhere is this clearer than in Susan Halls’s Edifice, a stack of animal-like figures in ceramic.
The shortlist is made up of 30 finalists from 19 countries drawn from more than 5,100 submissions. The works are made of a range of mediums including ceramics, woodwork, textiles, glass, metal, jewellery and lacquer. While previous years have seen the Craft Prize finalists’ work exhibited in Isamu Noguchi’s studio in New York, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, this year it will be exhibited at the National Gallery in Singapore, a building that offers its own commentary on balance in the contemporary world. The National Gallery is the latest version of a building that in the colonial era served as the Supreme Court. It was renovated by the Paris-based firm studioMilou and opened in 2016, home to the largest collection of modern and contemporary South East Asian art in the world.
Only one of the artists on the shortlist is from Singapore. Adelene Koh’s work Endless transforms book-binding techniques to create a pair of circular endbands – the fabric band sometimes found at the top and bottom of a book’s spine – supported by a wire core, with quires fanning out from the inner endband to the outer one.
As ever with the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, the innovative use of thread is particularly striking. Gjertrud Hals’s Scala – a group of vessels made from cotton-linen thread that is knitted together, covered in resin and moulded over a cardboard form – is especially beguiling, the gradient of colours suggesting the changing light of the Norwegian day.
The Zimbabwean artist Xanthe Somers plays with the idea of thread in her work The Caretaker’s Clotheshorse, a virtuoso display of woven clay that is carefully glazed to transform it into something that looks more like fabric than ceramic.
Perhaps it is the tapestry by the Ghanaian collective Baba Tree Master Weavers and the Spanish artist Álvaro Catalán de Ocón that best represents what is special about the Loewe Craft Prize. Woven in dyed and natural elephant grass, the work is an abstraction of overhead photography of housing in Ghana’s Gurunsi region. This remarkable display of basketry techniques shows how craft at its best can weave together different cultures and practices to create something innovative and beautiful.
The shortlisted pieces were selected by an expert panel. The prize of €50,000, plus €5,000 each for special mentions, will be awarded by a jury of 14 that includes Sheila Loewe, Loewe creative directors Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, the artist Magdalene Odundo and the designer Patricia Urquiola. The winner will be announced on 12 May.
The full list of shortlisted artists is:
Baba Tree Master Weavers × Álvaro Catalán de Ocón (Spain)
Jobe Burns (United Kingdom)
Soohyun Chou (Republic of Korea)
Morten Løbner Espersen (Denmark)
Liam Fleming (Australia)
Oskar Gustafsson (Sweden)
Susan Halls (United Kingdom)
Gjertrud Hals (Norway)
Chia-Chen Hsieh (Taiwan Region)
Adelene Koh (Singapore)
Maria Koshenkova (Denmark)
Jong In Lee (Republic of Korea)
Somyeong Lee (Republic of Korea)
Misako Nakahira (Japan)
Fadekemi Ogunsanya (Nigeria)
Jieun Park (Republic of Korea)
Jongjin Park (Republic of Korea)
Rafael Pérez Fernández (Spain)
Dorothea Prühl (Germany)
Kirstie Rea (Australia)
Vivi Rosa (Brazil)
Hervé Sabin (Haiti)
Xanthe Somers (Zimbabwe)
Coco Sung (Republic of Korea)
Nobuyuki Tanaka (Japan)
Graziano Visintin (Italy)
Rayah Wauters (Belgium)
Nan Wei (China)
Jane Yang-D’Haene (United States of America)
Ayano Yoshizumi (Japan)
