LOEWE’s Craft Prize Shortlist is Here – and It’s All About Pushing Tradition to the Edge

by OS Staff February 24, 2026

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.