Prix Marcel Duchamp 2025
Nominated Artists
Image: Bianca Bondi, Scrying in Astral Ponds, 2023. Site-specific installation, variable dimensions. Exhibition view, La Casa Encendida, Madrid. Photo: Maru Serrano
ART
Bianca Bondi
Nominated for the prix Marcel Duchamp
Bianca Bondi was born in 1986 in Johannesburg, South Africa. She lives and works in Paris. She is represented by Mor Charpentier gallery (Paris). Her multidisciplinary practice involves the activation or elevation of mundane objects through the use of salt water and chemical chain reactions. The materials she works with are chosen for their potential for mutation or their intrinsic and symbolic properties. Her aim is to promote sensory experiences beyond the visual and to celebrate the life of matter by focusing on interconnectedness, transience and the cycles of life and death. Passionate about ecology and the occult, Bianca Bondi combines the two in works of a transformative nature where the aura of objects is a key element.
Image: Xie Lei, Protection I, 2024, oil on canvas. Courtesy Semiose, Paris. Photo: Pauline Assathiany
ART
Xie Lei
Nominated for the prix Marcel Duchamp
Xie Lei has lived and worked in Paris since 2006. He is represented by Semiose gallery (Paris). As a painter, his practice reflects his sensitive universe and provides a field for experimentation to explore the specificity of the medium in contemporary art. His work is based on reality, but escapes to explore ambiguous and uncertain worlds that his imagination transforms. He focuses on the complexity of events and situations, and above all on their ambiguities and tensions. Xie Lei invites us to slow down our gaze and escape the intoxication of acceleration and immediacy. In his most recent works, he intrigues us with an in-between, that of sleep and death, torture and eroticism. The colours are dark, but mutate to become luminous and powerful.
Image: Eva Nielsen, Doline (Alluvions), 2023, oil, ink, acrylic on silkscreen on canvas, 230 x 190 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann
ART
Eva Nielsen
Nominated for the prix Marcel Duchamp
Eva Nielsen, born in 1983, lives and works in Paris. She is represented by Galerie Peter Kilchmann (Paris / Zurich) and The Pill gallery (Paris / Istanbul). Known for her hybrid paintings, which draw on latex, leather, silk and silkscreen to add a complex, unexpected dimension to her unique pictorial compositions, Nielsen allows the viewer to explore the landscapes she surveys in successive, immersive layers. The painter-photographer-plastician superimposes these stages to cast doubt on the making of the work.
Image: Lionel Sabatté, Pollens Clandestins exhibition view, Chateau de Chambord, 2023. Courtesy Ceysson & Bénétière. Photo: Leonard de Serres
ART
Lionel Sabatté
Nominated for the prix Marcel Duchamp
Born in 1975, Lionel Sabatté lives and works in Paris and Los Angeles, and is represented by Ceysson & Bénétière gallery. Working in painting, drawing and sculpture, he strives to create a dialogue between all his works. The sphere of the living and the transformations of matter due to the passage of time are at the heart of his work. For several years now, he has been collecting materials that bear the mark of a past experiences: dust, ash, charcoal, dead skin, tree stumps... The resulting works carry both a delicacy and a ‘disturbing strangeness’, giving life to a hybrid bestiary. His research into minerals and animals is part of a global reflection on our condition and the place we occupy in our environment.
About the Prix Marcel Duchamp Nominated Artists
Maison&Objet 2025
Image: Gummy Armchair & Palette Coffee Table © DR
DESIGN
Faye Toogood
Designer of the Year
Maison&Objet has named Faye Toogood as Designer of the Year 2025. An iconic figure in British design, Faye Toogood is a total artist. Trained in art history, she expresses herself with equal freedom in design, fashion, drawing and sculpture. Toogood's style is characterised by a search for simple, raw materials, which she shapes in her own unique way. Imagination, freedom and the spirit of childhood are two fundamental values for the designer. For the new edition of Maison&Objet, from 16 to 20 January in Paris, Faye Toogood will be presenting WOMANIFESTO!, her installation inspired by this year's theme: Surreality. In a surreal setting, she invites us into her own brain, to dissect her creative process.
Image: Sunset, 2024 © Soluna Fine Craft; Vino Chair, Kuo Duo, 2024 © DR; Another day in the studio, 2023 © Sean Davidson; Al-Form, 2024 © DR; Proportions of Stone, Shelf 01 © DR; Sun, Moon, and Five Buildings, 2023 © DR; Body chair, 2018 © DR.
DESIGN
Rising Talents
For the 2025 edition of the Rising Talents Awards, Maison&Objet has set its sights on South Korea. The Korean peninsula is a highly inspiring playground for a new generation of designers who are exploring the paradoxes between Western influences and the roots of their craft heritage, innovating with ancestral materials and shifting the boundaries between design and art. This year's Rising Talents are: Dahye Jeong, Kuo Duo, Minjae Kim, niceworkshop, Sisan Lee and Woojai Lee. Stéphane Galerneau, President of Ateliers d’Art de France, has selected In Yeonghye as the Rising Talent Craft winner.
AR Awards 2024
Image: Manuel Cervantes Estudio, post-hurricane house, Acapulco, Mexico.
ARCHITECTURE
Post-hurricane houses
by Manuel Cervantes Estudio
AR House
Manuel Cervantes Estudio’s post-hurricane houses in Acapulco, Mexico is the winner of the AR House awards 2024. Towns and cities on Mexico’s Pacific coast are increasingly at risk from hurricanes, with two highly destructive storms in the last two years. In the aftermath of Hurricane Otis in 2023, Manuel Cervantes Estudio with non-profit organisations Asociación Gilberto and Construyendo established the Kon-tigo initiative to build long-term residences for people in Acapulco whose homes had been damaged or destroyed. Each house costs an average US$18,000 to build and use innovative pre-fabricated panels. 42 houses have been completed, with another 78 ongoing.
Image: A Threshold, Subterranean Ruins, Kaggalipura, India, 2022. Photo: Edmund Sumner
ARCHITECTURE
A Threshold
AR Emerging
A Threshold, founded by Avinash Ankalge and Harshith Nayak, is the winner of the AR Emerging awards 2024. Announcing the winners, the jury praised A Threshold for their "point of view, rooted in their local context and the traditions of India." The panel commended A Threshold’s "ability to educate their clients" and introduce public value to privately commissioned projects. For the project dubbed Subterranean Ruins, the Bangalore-based practice imagined a public life for a private guest house, finding community benefit in a commercial brief.
BMW ART MAKERS
Image: Raphaëlle Peria, La mare du jardin bleue, engraved linoleum, 200 x 300 cm, 2024.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Raphaëlle Peria and Fanny Robin
BMW ART MAKERS
Artist Raphaëlle Peria and curator Fanny Robin are the winning duo of BMW ART MAKERS programme. They were chosen by the jury for their project Traversée du fragment manquant, which will be presented at the Rencontres d’Arles and Paris Photo. Traversée du fragment manquantaddresses the decline of the plane trees that line the Canal du Midi, a UNESCO World Heritage site, which have been affected since 2006 by a disease caused by a microscopic fungus. Combining personal archives and current photographs of the canal's surroundings, the artist Raphaëlle Peria adresses the transformation of an endangered ecosystem, illustrating its evolution in order to preserve its memory.