Otobong Nkanga Wins Nasher Prize for Sculpture
Nkanga received the U.S. $100,000 award for a practice the jury said 'maps urgent global problems but does so in subtle, enigmatic, and probing ways'.
Otobong Nkanga (2023). Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Wim van Dongen.
The Nasher Sculpture Centre, Dallas, announced Otobong Nkanga, the winner of the 2025 prize for her 'outstanding contributions to sculpture.'
'Nkanga's work makes clear the essential place of sculpture in contemporary life', said Nasher Sculpture Centre Director Jeremy Strick.
The Belgian-Nigerian artist is known for performative and sculptural works that draw upon associations of land, people and substances. These works begin with substantial research into raw materials—such as spices, metals, and oils—and often their extraction and movement across continents.
'I'm very interested in the microscopic and the general, and how those two things intersect and play roles and expand our understanding of what we are', Nkanga said in a Conversation with Ocula Magazine's Stephanie Bailey in 2018.
Her work, Strick said, 'makes manifest the myriad connections—historical, sociological, economic, cultural, and spiritual—that we have to the materials that comprise our lives.'
Nkanga won the Special Mention Prize at the 58th Venice Biennale for her 26-metre-long marble and glass Veins Aligned, which made reference to local materials and their affiliations. In 2019 she won the Sharjah Biennial Prize for her multimedia interventions in collaboration with Emeka Ogboh on the grounds of the ruined Bait Al Aboudi.
'Otobong Nkanga maps urgent global problems but does so in subtle, enigmatic, and probing ways,' said Professor Briony Fer, one of the prize's jurors.
'The intense and productive way in which she presents formal and material questions is what marks out her huge contribution to sculpture right now,' she added.
Nkanga will be the first artist-laureate to receive the prize in a new biennial format—a change which organisers state is to give more time to show the artists works at Nasher and communicate their importance in the sculptural field.
She will be presented the prize on 5 April 2025 in conjunction with a dedicated solo exhibition and artist monograph published by the museum.
Previous Nasher Prize laureates include: Senga Nengudi (2023), Nairy Baghramian (2022), Isa Genzken (2019), and Pierre Huyghe (2017).—[O]
