Turner Prize 2026 shortlist names four artists shaping British art now
Tate Britain has announced the four artists shortlisted for the 2026 Turner Prize: Simeon Barclay, Kira Freije, Marguerite Humeau, and Tanoa Sasraku. The prize exhibition will open at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) in Middlesbrough on September 26, 2026, and remain on view through March 29, 2027. The winner will be announced at MIMA on December 10, 2026.
Each shortlisted artist will receive £10,000, while the winner will be awarded £25,000. Established in 1984, the Turner Prize has long served as a barometer for the direction of contemporary British art, often drawing attention to practices that move between sculpture, installation, performance, and moving image.
Freije’s nomination centers on “Unspeak the Chorus” at The Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire, her first major solo presentation in the U.K. Known for abstract aluminum corporeal forms, she builds sculptures that incorporate faces cast from loved ones, fabric, lighting, handblown glass, and found materials. Her work also reflects the blacksmithing experience she gained after graduating from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford in 2011.
Humeau is nominated for “Torches,” a 2025 exhibition presented at ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark and Helsinki Art Museum in Finland. Her installations often braid poetry, sound, video, and drawing into speculative environments that consider origin, transformation, and the threshold between life and death. In “Torches,” organic and found materials such as beeswax, wasp venom, yeast, bronze, and alabaster form a multisensory landscape for a partly imagined ecosystem in flux.
Sasraku’s nomination comes for “Morale Patch,” her solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. Working across drawing, filmmaking, and sculpture, she uses printmaking, sewing, and garment construction to examine how power structures and landscapes are shaped over time. In the exhibition, crude oil and objects tied to the oil industry appear as charged relics of empire, linking material history to political conflict.
The shortlist reflects a broad field of sculptural and installation-based practices, with each artist building a distinct world from research, memory, and material intelligence. Last year’s Turner Prize was awarded to Nnena Kalu, and this year’s exhibition at MIMA will offer a concentrated view of where the prize’s attention is now turning.
