Eyes on Talents News

art

Xie Lei

Prix Marcel Duchamp

Xie Lei is the winner of the Prix Marcel Duchamp 2025. He has lived and worked in Paris since 2006 and is represented by Semiose gallery (Paris). In the collective exhibition for the prize, held at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, the artist presents seven monumental canvases in shades of phosphorescent green, blurring the boundaries of reality and transforming gravity into a dreamlike experience. Xie Lei has perfected a style of painting that embraces ambiguity, in which the humans he depicts, whose features and gender are rarely identifiable, undeniably navigate between two worlds.

Image: View of Xie Lei's installation for the exhibition of the Prix Marcel Duchamp 2025 at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris. Photo: Aurélien Mole.

art

Sequoia Scavullo

Prix Matsutani

As part of Asia NOW 2025, the Prix Matsutani was awarded to Sequoia Scavullo. Born in Baltimore (USA) in 1995, Sequoia Scavullo lives in Paris. The artist brings to life invisible forces and signs in her work, whose autobiographical resonances transform into mythology. As a painter, the surface of her canvases acts like a membrane, folded, rippling, veiling or enclosing ambiguous figures: horses, waterfalls, body fragments, or more recently, crystalline architecture. A realm of dreams that Scavullo channels through painting, where the motifs point toward the psychic and active reality of symbolic events, particularly those she inherits by tracing her Taino genealogy.

Image: Sequoia Scavullo, If only I could sit tight inside the eagles claws, 2025. Oil on canvas, printed cotton, holographic paper print, 150 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Sans titre gallery, Paris.
Photo: Aurélien Mole.

art

Gwladys Gambie

Ettore e Ines Fico Prize

At AKAA 2025, the first Ettore e Ines Fico Prize was awarded to Gwladys Gambie, presented by La Maison Gaston. The award reflects the foundation’s commitment to supporting the contemporary African art scene and boosting its visibility on the international stage. Born in 1988 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, Gwladys Gambie explores Black womanhood through drawing, sculpture and embroidery. Using Creole's symbolic richness, she crafts a unique iconography that challenges colonial legacies and reimagines the Black female body through a poetic, decolonial lens.

Image: Gwladys Gambie, Poetic of celebration series, 2023. Ink on paper, 75 x 110 cm.
Courtesy La Maison Gaston

design

Best of Show Awards

Design Miami.Paris awarded its Best of Show awards. Best Gallery Presentation went to debut exhibitor Yves Macaux Gallery (Brussels) which specialises in Viennese masterpieces. Best Design at Large Presentation went to James de Wulf's Resonating Ping Pong Table, Song no. 1 (2025). The multisensory piece of design incorporates sound within its function: the table’s surface is formed from layers of aluminum plates, tuned to an A Minor Pentatonic scale. Best Contemporary Work went to Extended Form Three (2025) by Adam Pendleton presented by Friedman Benda. Best Historic Work went to Bureau Présidence (c. 1951) and Table à Plans (1951) by Jean Prouvé presented by LAFFANOUR | Galerie Downtown.

Image: © Design Miami.Paris

art

Liu Wei

The Genesis Facade Commission

The Metropolitan Museum of Art named Liu Wei as The Genesis Facade Commission Artist for 2026. Four site specific sculptures by the Beijing-based artist will be revealed in fall 2026. Liu, known for his monumental and evocative sculptural installations, will bring his observations of the present to The Met’s Fifth Avenue facade. His new works for the niches will play with perspective and scale and address cycles of rupture, resistance, mending and creating in history. Instead of a totalizing narrative, Liu will present composite sculptures made with a variety of materials that provoke complex feelings and reactions amid uncertainties in contemporary life.

Image: Liu Wei, 58th International Art Exhibition, May You Live In Interesting Times, Biennale Arte 2019. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Italo Rondinella.

architecture

Mario Schjetnan

Oberlander Prize

The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) announced that Mexico City-based landscape architect Mario Schjetnan and his firm Grupo de Diseño Urbano (GDU) are the recipients of the 2025 Oberlander Prize. According to TCLF, Schjetnan belongs to a generation of landscape architects, architects and urbanists who became aware of the environmental impacts of urban development and their consequences for life, the planet and its inhabitants. He and the GDU team are the first Latin Americans to be awarded the Oberlander Prize.

Image: Grupo de Diseño Urbano, Museum of the Northern Cultures, Paquimé, Mexico.
Photo: Fernando Barragan.

art

Jonas Lund

Prix Arts numériques

Jonas Lund is the winner of the first edition of the Prix Arts numériques for his work MVP (Most Valuable Painting). Born in 1984, Jonas Lund is a Swedish artist who creates works that take a critical look at contemporary networked systems and power structures. He designs performative works, often requiring audience participation, in which tasks are carried out according to algorithms or a set of rules, thus exploring issues raised by the increasing digitization of our society. MVP is a participatory algorithmic art project that critically examines how value is determined in the art world by creating a system where viewer engagement directly influences aesthetic outcomes.

Image: Jonas Lund Jonas Lund, MVP (Most Valuable Painting), view of the exhibition Studio Visit: How to Make Art in the Age of Algorithms, Francisco Carolixnum, OÖ Art, Linz, 2022.

art

Daiga Grantina and Emalin gallery

Prix Fluxus-CPGA

Fluxus Art Projects, Frieze London and the Comité Professionnel des Galeries d’Art announced Daiga Grantina and Emalin gallery as the winners of the Prix FLUXUS-CPGA. Daiga Grantina (b. 1985, Saldus, Latvia) lives and works in Paris, France. Grantina's sculptures investigate the encounters between materials and their consequent relationships of dissonance and consonance, inducing an exercise in expanded vision. Her material gestures resonate with the structural shifts of organisms and environments, navigating relations of volume and form at the point where microscopic and macroscopic overlap and intersect.

Image: Daiga Grantina, Untitled, 2024, installation view Four Sides of a Shadow, Z33, Hasselt, Belgium. Wood, fabric, paint, ink, resin, string, light, 300 x 320 x 350 cm. Courtesy the artist and Emalin, London. Photo: Toan Vu-Huu.

fashion

Lucas Emilio Brunner

Grand Prix du Jury Mode

Swiss-Chilean designer Lucas Emilio Brunner won the top prize at the 40th edition of the Festival international de mode, de photographie et d’accessoires – Hyères. His collection À bout de souffle, Travail de dissection d'un ballon de fête [Out of breath, Dissection of a party balloon] puts party balloons at the center of his designs, ingeniously adapting the principles from his in-depth research on the theme to clothing.

Image: Lucas Emilio Brunner, À bout de souffle, Fashion Show.

architecture

St Mary’s Walthamstow

Stephen Lawrence Prize

The winner of the Stephen Lawrence Prize 2025 is St. Mary’s Walthamstow by Alex Spicer at Matthew Lloyd Architects. St Mary’s, the oldest and — with its Grade II* listed status — most protected building in Walthamstow, has been sensitively repaired and transformed into a flexible, inclusive and welcoming space for the whole community to enjoy, as well as a place of worship. With a focus on encouraging and nurturing new talent, the award exclusively recognises projects led by an early career project architect.

Image: Matthew Lloyd Architects, St Mary’s Walthamstow, Walthamstow, East London, UK.
Photo: Tim Crocker.