Nnena Kalu, 59, from Glasgow, has won the 2025 Turner Prize — the first learning-disabled artist to claim the UK's most prestigious art honor and its £25,000 prize.
Kalu's work doesn't fit neatly into categories. She builds cocoon-like sculptures wrapped in videotape and cellophane, their surfaces catching light in ways that feel almost alive. Alongside these pieces, she creates dense, spiraling drawings that map the rhythm of her own hand — each line a record of repetitive motion, turned into something abstract and compelling. The jury described her work as "bold and compelling," praising how she translates "expressive gesture into captivating abstract sculpture and drawing."
What makes this win significant isn't just the prize itself. It's the path that got here. Kalu has been creating art since 1999, working with ActionSpace, a London nonprofit supporting disabled artists. For over two decades, the commercial art world largely ignored her. Last year, the gallery Arcadia Missa finally took her on — a breakthrough that came only after decades of work and, as ActionSpace's Charlotte Hollinshead put it plainly, "an incredible amount of discrimination that continues to this day."
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Start Your News Detox"When Nnena first began working with ActionSpace in 1999, the art world was not interested," Hollinshead said. "Hopefully this award smashes that prejudice away."
The Turner Prize itself has been under pressure. The 2019 edition saw all four nominees jointly share the award, fracturing the prize's authority. This year, some British critics questioned whether it was worth keeping at all. A Telegraph op-ed argued it was "time to scrap the Turner Prize." Early reviews of the exhibition had suggested photographer Rene Matić or painter Mohammed Sami might take it.
But Kalu's win has shifted the conversation. Guardian critic Adrian Searle wrote that her work is "so embodied, so sensuous" that "it becomes difficult to distinguish between the activity of making and the thing itself." That description captures something essential: her sculptures and drawings don't feel separate from her body, her effort, her presence. They are the record of a person making art, not a polished product dropped from nowhere.
The Turner Prize shortlist itself reflected a broader shift — it included photographers, painters, and artists working across different practices and backgrounds. Kalu's victory suggests the prize is finding its footing by recognizing work that matters, not work that fits a formula.
For disabled artists in particular, this opens a door. Kalu's win makes visible what was always true: that disabled artists create work worthy of the highest recognition, and that institutions that have overlooked them for decades were simply wrong.
