The Turner Prize, England’s most polarizing art award, is back, with a show of work by the four nominated artists for this year’s honor now on view at the Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford, England. For once, however, there is some degree of consensus: at least three critics want Mohammed Sami to win.
Sami, a painter born in Baghdad and based in London, makes large-scale paintings that deal with war, albeit in oblique ways. Rather than explicitly showing us carnage and conflict, he’ll merely allude to it. Massacre (2023), a painting in the Blenheim Palace show that gained him his Turner Prize nomination, features a trodden area in a dirt field planted with sunflowers.
“Memory and conflict are his subjects — the unreliable, fragmentary nature of the former and the causes and effects of the latter,” wrote Nancy Durrant in the Times. “Evocative, allusive and fantastically well executed, these are stunning works that reward lengthy contemplation.”
In his review for the Independent, Mark Hudson reported that Sami is “near universally considered a shoo-in for this year’s Turner.” In the Telegraph, Alastair Sooke singled out The Hunter’s Return, a long painting resembling a disturbed landscape being pierced by lasers, and said the work is “so strong, so unnerving that, surely, the prize must go to him.”
Adrian Searle is the only major critic so far to call for a different winner. In his review for the Guardian, he wrote that he preferred Nnena Kalu, an autistic, learning disabled artist who makes sculptures from accumulations of tape, fabric, cable ties, and more. “They rise above us, reaching out or snarling in on themselves,” Searle wrote. “They’re bound and unbound and filled with variety. These embodied forms have a complex physicality.”
Also nominated this year are Rene Matić, a young photographer known for their Nan Goldin–like installations of images, and Zadie Xa, who is showing a mirrored floor installation complemented by walls that abound with color.
Those mix of nominees and the show itself earned the expected gripes from the critics. Hudson’s Independent review seemed to bristle against such a focus on identity: “True to recent form, Britain’s best-known art prize seems as if it’s out to make some kind of point with the demographic of its 2025 shortlist: none of the four nominees have typically British names, one is non-binary, and another is neurodivergent.” Still, Hudson praised the show for spotlighting artists who have “returned to the act of physically making things.”
Searle and Hudson awarded the show three stars out of five, while Sooke gave it four. Durrant wrote that the “beautifully installed” show offers “an intriguing snapshot of what’s going on in contemporary art.”
