The Turner Award is England’s most polarized art award, and is back, with the works of four nominees of the honors of this year now on display at the Cartwright Hall Gallery in Bradford, England. However, there was a consensus that at least three critics wanted Mohammed Sami to win.
Sami is a Baghdad-born painter based in London and produced large-scale paintings involving war, albeit in a slanted way. He won’t show us the Holocaust and the conflict explicitly, but just hint at it. massacre (2023) is a painting from Blenheim Palace that won his Turner Award nomination, which has a dirt field with sunflowers on a dirt field.
Nancy Durrant era. “Euciating, allegorical and wonderfully executed, these are amazing works that reward long meditation.”
In his comments IndependentMark Hudson reports that Sami is “almost considered to be Turner’s shoo this year.” telegraphalastair Sooke picks it out The Hunter’s Returna long painting similar to a disturbing landscape pierced by a laser, and said the work was “so powerful, so disturbing that he must certainly be given a prize.”
Adrian Searle is by far the only major critic who needs other winners. In his comments guardianHe wrote that he prefers Nnena Kalu, an autistic, learning-with-disabled artist who makes sculptures from the accumulation of tape, fabric, wired relationships, and more. “They crossed us, reaching out or roaring themselves,” Sell wrote. “They are bound and boundless, full of diversity. These concrete forms have complex physical states.”
Also nominated this year are ReneMatić, a young photographer known for Nan Goldin’s image installations, and Zadie XA, who is showing mirrored floor installations and complementing them with colorful walls.
The mix of those nominees and the show itself won the expected grip of critics. Hudson’s Independent The comments seem to object to this focus on identity: “Faithful to recent forms, the UK’s most famous art award seems to be making some point among its 2025 shortlist: Four nominees usually don’t have British names, one non-binary, one non-binary, and the other neuronal.” Still, Hudson praised the show for the much-anticipated artists who “returned to their physical behavior.”
Searle and Hudson awarded five-star shows, while Sooke awarded four-stars. Durrant wrote that the “beautifully installed” show provides “an interesting snapshot of what’s going on in contemporary art.”
