Prix de Photographie de l’Académie des
beaux-arts - William Klein 2025
Image: Arno Rafael Minkkinen, Fosters Pond, 1989 II.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Arno Rafael Minkkinen
Prix de Photographie de l’Académie des
beaux-arts - William Klein
The Prix de Photographie de l’Académie des beaux-arts - William Klein 2025 was awarded to Finnish-American photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen. In his work, he explores the relationship between the body and nature, without any subsequent manipulation of any kind. Somewhere between reality and fiction, he reinvents the black-and-white self-portrait with graphic compositions in which the body becomes a tool for creating surprising visual constructions. Arno Rafael Minkkinen works alone and creates his images through his visual imagination and physical performance. Rarely able to see what his camera has seen at the moment of exposure, he is in almost all his shots his own assistant.
About the Prix de Photographie de l’Académie des beaux-arts - William Klein
Prix Art & Environnement 2025
Image: Oxalis (detail), 2024 © Pooya Abassian
ART
Pooya Abbasian
Prix Art & Environnement
Lee Ufan Arles and Guerlain have announced Pooya Abbasian as the winner of the third edition of the Prix Art & Environnement. Born in 1985, Pooya Abbasian is a French-Iranian artist who has been living and working in Paris since 2011. Through a multidisciplinary practice that explores photography, drawing, video and installation, his approach questions our contemporary relationship with images. Having begun his career in cinema and drawing, these two spheres have influenced his practice and thinking. For his residency at Lee Ufan Arles, Pooya Abbasian wishes to work on a project entitled Senecón, born from the observation of so-called ‘wild’ plants, often referred to as ‘weeds’.
About the Prix Art & Environnement
Isamu Noguchi Award 2025
Image: Mira Nakashima, Keisho/Noguchi Coffee Table, 1998. American Black Walnut, Rosewood. 38 3/4 x 30 x 14 3/4 in. Kan Yasuda, Shosei, White Marble, H 250 x 298 x 84 cm, 2 pieces.
ART
Mira Nakashima
Kan Yasuda
Isamu Noguchi Award
The 2025 Isamu Noguchi Award recognizes architect and designer Mira Nakashima and sculptor Kan Yasuda. Mira Nakashima's lifelong work honors the vision of her father, George Nakashima, a contemporary and kindred spirit of Isamu Noguchi. Her designs, collectively titled Keisho(Japanese for ‘continuation’), preserve George Nakashima’s core principles: harmony with nature, reverence for wood and spiritual craftsmanship, while evolving toward new, deeply personal forms. Kan Yasuda is renowned for his majestic works in marble and bronze. Sculptural forms that invite touch, contemplation and interaction, often defined by softened contours, quiet voids and an almost meditative monumentalism.
Roswitha Haftmann Prize 2025
Image: Cecilia Vicuña, Vaso de leche, 1979. Site-specific performance installation, Bogotá. Photo: Oscar Monsalve. Courtesy of the artist. © 2025 Cecilia Vicuña
ART
Cecilia Vicuña
Roswitha Haftmann Prize
Cecilia Vicuña has been awarded the Roswitha Haftmann Prize 2025. Her practice spans painting, poetry, installation, performance, film and activism, always with a clear focus on social justice, indigenous cultures, ecological concerns and the transformative power of language. She is internationally recognized for her large-scale installations made of raw materials such as wool, threads or found objects, fragile yet powerful works that touch both collective memory and personal remembrance. Exiled after the Chilean military coup of 1973, she has consistently developed an interdisciplinary, feminist and anti-colonial approach. Her oeuvre is a passionate plea for poetry as a way of life.
About the Roswitha Haftmann Prize
Prix COAL 2025
Image: Charlotte Gautier van Tour, Bloom : le sang des glaciers. © Pascal Deloche / Adagp, Paris, 2025.
ART
Charlotte Gautier van Tour
Prix COAL
The Prix COAL 2025 was awarded to Charlotte Gautier van Tour for her project Bloom : le sang des glaciers, name given to a phenomenon caused by microalgae that proliferate at high altitudes, particularly in alpine ecosystems, and colour the snow red. Their proliferation, accentuated by rising temperatures, changes not only the colour of the snow but also its albedo, leading to an acceleration in the melting of the ice. In collaboration with scientists and inspired by ancient legends, Charlotte Gautier van Tour is developing a series of works and experiments on the aquatic history of the Alps, from its origin under water to its current melting, making the snow's fresh water a living environment on the verge of extinction.
Soane Medal 2025
Image: Madelon Vriesendorp, Flagrant Delit. Courtesy of the artist.
ARCHITECTURE
Madelon Vriesendorp
Soane Medal
Dutch artist and OMA co-founder Madelon Vriesendorp has been awarded this year's Soane Medal. Madelon Vriesendorp is known for her influential artwork including Flagrant Delit, a painting depicting the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building in bed together, which was used as the front cover of Koolhaas's Delirious New York. Over the decades, her work has given architectural theories playful and memorable identities, helping to explain complex ideas behind modern and postmodern architecture through visuals fuelled by her own unique imagination, where buildings have human characteristics and inner lives.
Prix LE BAL / ADAGP de la Jeune Création
Image: Untitled © Constance Nouvel / ADAGP, Paris, 2025
PHOTOGRAPHY
Constance Nouvel
Prix LE BAL / ADAGP de la Jeune Création
The 6th Prix LE BAL / ADAGP de la Jeune Création has been awarded to Constance Nouvel for her project Parole divine - Images d'ici, et au-delà [Divine Word - Images from here, and beyond] (working title). For this project, Constance Nouvel wants to combine photography and Egyptology, "questioning the photographic medium in its anthropological dimension" to "search for what is precious to humanity: a memory". Her work will be exhibited at LE BAL in 2027, accompanied by a publication.
About the Prix LE BAL / ADAGP de la Jeune Création
2025 MacArthur Fellows
Image: Jeremy Frey, Aura, 2023. Black ash, sweet grass, synthetic dye, 21 x 12 x 12 in ;
53.34 x 30.48 x 30.48 cm.
ART
MacArthur Fellows
The 2025 MacArthur Fellows have been announced. Artists Garrett Bradley, Gala Porras-Kim, Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Jeremy Frey are among the 22 winners. Bradley remains best known for her Oscar-nominated documentary Time (2020), which charted one woman’s quest to free her husband from prison. Porras-Kim’s work reflects on the notion of art institutions, asking what information is conveyed and concealed when an object enters museum walls. Nguyen’s films, installations and sculptures meditate on trauma and colonization, but he often approaches war’s effects in ways that transcend the historical record. Frey is a seventh-generation Passamaquoddy basket maker whose work keeps alive forms of Indigenous knowledge that risk being lost to time.
