RIBA Royal Gold Medal 2025
Image: SANAA. 21st Century Museum of Art, Japan. Courtesy of SANAA. New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 2007. Photo: Dean Kaufman. Sydney Modern Museum, Australia, 2022. Photo: Iwan Baan.
ARCHITECTURE
SANAA
RIBA Royal Gold Medal
The Royal Institute of British Architects has announced that Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, founders of the practice SANAA, will receive the 2025 Royal Gold Medal for architecture. The award recognises what RIBA describes as SANAA's contribution to shaping contemporary architecture through simplicity, light and refined design. RIBA has credited the practice with balancing innovation and sensitivity to local environments, stating that their approach demonstrates how architecture can be both functional and elegant while providing a sense of calm in an increasingly complex world.
About the RIBA Royal Gold Medal
2024 Foundwork Artist Prize
Image: Satpreet Kahlon, From all of us, 2023. Scanned archival photos on cardboard substrate, scanned card given to artist on her 4th birthday, weaving yarn, scrap wood, staples, pigment, crayon, wax, beads, pipe cleaners, plaster, rain water from the Great Basin in nevada, journal entry from august 2023.
ART
Satpreet Kahlon
Foundwork Artist Prize
Panjabi-born artist, organizer and educator Satpreet Kahlon, currently based in Brooklyn, New York, has been awarded the 2024 Foundwork Artist Prize. Her practice is concerned with illegibility, inscrutability and collapse. Beginning with the understanding that most Indigenous cultures are existing in a post-apocalyptic reality, she approaches the act of building sculpture as a kind of prayer: a futile attempt to communicate with and better know generations of lost, unknowable histories; an endlessly looping signal without reply.
About the Foundwork Artist Prize
Art Genève 2025
Image: La Mobilière stand, Art Genève 2025. © La Mobilière
The pram containing a black and white video is a work by Alfatih.
ART
Alfatih
Prix Mobilière
At Art Genève, Alfatih won the Prix Mobilière 2025, awarded each year to a young Swiss personality. By bringing together developments in the virtual world, video games and interactive design in the field of contemporary art, his work breaks down the barriers between fields that are still often regarded as opposites and encourages us to reflect on our reality.
Image: Richard Saltoun Gallery stand, Art Genève 2025.
ART
Richard Saltoun Gallery
Prix Solo
The Prix Solo Art Genève - F.P.Journe, the fair's prize for the best solo exhibit, was awarded to Richard Saltoun's presentation of paintings by the late Algerian artist Baya, with works by Baya acquired by the MAMCO Geneva (Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Genève). At a time when many European artists continued to paint women in exoticized and sexualized ways, Baya populated her canvases with expressive, joyfully rendered women that complicated stereotypes about North African conservatism as well as norms of female representation.
Prix Polyptyque 2024
Image: © Driss Aroussi © Elie Monferier © Marion Ellena © Eleonora Paciullo
PHOTOGRAPHY
Driss Aroussi
Marion Ellena
Elie Monferier
Eleonora Paciullo
Prix Polyptyque
Since 2018, the Polyptyque contemporary photography fair, organised by the Centre Photographique Marseille, has sought to highlight the artists of our time and their approaches to the medium. Through its prize, it offers visibility to local photographers. After a presentation of the finalists' work in Marseille in summer 2024, the jury recognised Driss Aroussi and his multidisciplinary approach, Marion Ellena and her experiments mixing digital and analogue, and Eleonora Paciullo and her captivating monochromes. The fourth winner in a new category, artist's book, is Elie Monferier and her self-published work Journal des Mines.
2025 USA Fellowship
Image: Family Tree II by Sadie Barnette, 2022. Installation view of Inheritance. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo by Ron Amstutz.
ART
USA Fellowship
United States Artists (USA) has announced the 50 artists that will receive their annual fellowship. Among them, the six visual artists are Caroline Kent, Gala Porras-Kim, Kahlil Robert Irving, Karyn Olivier, Sadie Barnette and Sherrill Roland. Established in 2006, the fellowship recognises artists and cultural practitioners working in the United States and its island jurisdictions, at every stage of their career, and from a range of disciplines including architecture and design, craft, dance, film, media, music, theatre and performance, traditional arts, visual art and writing.
