With a work that embodies the poetics of collapse.
In a year in which the lines between art, design and craft are blurring more than ever, Kunimasa Aoki wins the LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize 2025 with his Realm of Living Things 19 (2024). It is a terracotta sculpture that is as visceral as it is precise. The piece, which pushes the material’s possibilities to the limit, has earned the Japanese artist the jury’s applause and a cash prize of €50,000.
Presented as part of the exhibition of the 30 finalists at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, the artwork proposes a profound dialogue with matter: layers of clay rolled up, stacked and subjected to the unstable laws of gravity, time and pressure. The result is an almost living form, a body that breathes the tension between control and accident, technique and chance.
Realm of Living Things 19, with its anamorphic character, is not merely to be observed: it demands to be viewed from multiple angles, where the microscopic detail of the surface – with its pencil marks and earthy finishes – reveals inner universes, fragments of an emotional geology.
The jury, made up of names such as Patricia Urquiola, Oliver Gabet, Wang Shu, Magdalene Odundo and Frida Escobedo, valued Aoki‘s honesty in exploring the artisanal process of traditional coiling.
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