The Japanese artist Kunimasa Aoki has won the €50,000 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize for his work Realm of Living Things 19 (2024), Loewe has announced. Special mentions were awarded to Nifemi Marcus-Bello for TM Bench with Bowl (2023) and Studio Sumakshi Singh for Monument (2024).
The jury selected Aoki from a shortlist of 30 artists. They praised his work for ‘its honest expression of the ancestral coil process, and how the material is expressed in its raw, unfinished form.’
Based in Kawaguchi, Japan, Aoki is a sculptor working in terracotta. He studied at the Department of Sculpture at Musashino Art University in Tokyo before obtaining a postgraduate degree from the University’s Graduate School of Art and Design. His sculptures use innovative techniques to explore how clay cracks, distorts and compresses under pressure.
Founded in 2016, the annual Loewe Foundation Craft Prize aims to showcase and celebrate ‘newness, excellence and artistic merit in modern craft’, acknowledging the importance of crafts and artisans in today’s culture.
All of the shortlisted artists are on show at Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid through 29 June.
