OS Staff

LOEWE Foundation has just unveiled the 30 finalists for the latest LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize, and the shortlist reads like a global moodboard for what contemporary craft looks like when it stops behaving. Pulled from more than 5,000 submissions across 133 countries and regions, this year’s selection frames tradition not as a museum label, but as a flexible material — something you can bend, crack, re-fire, and rebuild into a new language.

According to the piece, the works share a sense of productive tension: deformed geometries, agitated surfaces, and structures that look close to collapse — objects that feel as much like they’re happening as they are “finished.” It’s craft as risk, process, and material intelligence, where the hand doesn’t simply perfect — it tests the limits of what a medium can hold.

The finalists’ works will be exhibited at National Gallery Singapore from 13 May to 14 June 2026, positioning the prize less as a closed industry moment and more as a public-facing snapshot of how making is mutating right now — across disciplines, geographies, and inherited techniques. The winner will be announced on 12 May 2026, immediately ahead of the exhibition opening.

A key update is also tucked into the jury details: the panel now includes LOEWE’s creative directors Jack McColloughand Lazaro Hernandez, adding a sharper fashion-world gaze to an award that has spent a decade mapping the perimeter where art, innovation, and craftsmanship overlap.

Beyond the prize itself, the article points to LOEWE Foundation’s longer-game investment in the conditions craft actually needs — namely time and space. Alongside the prize cycle, the foundation has launched three two-month residencies at La Residencia, A Belmond Hotel, in Mallorca, extending the ecosystem from “award season” into sustained practice.

Where the shortlist really lands, though, is in its range: makers from Spain and Denmark to Korea, Haiti, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Japan, China, Belgium, Brazil, and beyond — a spread that suggests craft isn’t a niche revival, but a worldwide pressure point where the future of form is being negotiated.