Art between worlds: who won the Luxembourg Art Prize 2025

Luxembourg Art Prize, one of the most ambitious international competitions in the art world, has summarised the results of its eleventh season. The winners are artists whose practices not only break the boundaries between genres and materials, but also question the very understanding of contemporary art.

• 1st place: Tithi Arekar, India / USA (New Jersey) - €20,000
• 2nd place: Bora Lee, South Korea - €10,000
• 3rd place: Tsutomu Sasaki (Tsutomu Sasaki / ササキツトム), Japan - €5,000

Each winner also received a personalised analytical article in the authoritative ArtCritic magazine, which has a circulation of 15 million readers. This is not just recognition - it is a launch into the global art space.

Titi Arekar: the fabric of memory

At 23, Titi Arekar has already graduated from Parsons in New York, won internationally and created a unique artistic language. She weaves giant installations out of old saris, turning them into textile portals that you can literally walk into. The artist's central work is Reviving Traditions. The installation is more than three metres high and envelops the viewer like a comforting blanket that has absorbed centuries of women's memory.

For Arekar, fabric is not a material but a carrier of a living archive. But her work is not stuck in the past: it is inspired by the rustic practice of ghogha, a patchwork of quilts in which women share stories and care. Arekar turns this into an aesthetics of care, breaking down the barriers between craft and high art.

Bora Lee: behind the cosmetic mask

South Korean artist Bora Lee's works are literally painted with cosmetics: lipstick, foundation and shadow take the place of paint. Her project Cosmetic Drawing explores how make-up is used not to beautify, but to hide the true self. She works at the intersection of Jungian psychoanalysis and Irving Goffman's sociology, turning canvases into theatre scenes.

The works "Veiled Breath" and "Bound Breath" are images of wrapped forms, the colour red bursting through shadows and black lashings, as a symbol of the inner self held back by a social persona. These "wraps" are a metaphor for contemporary pressures: cosmetics become the language the artist uses to speak of pain, defence, love and suppression.

Tsutomu Sasaki: transparency and paradox

Tsutomu Sasaki has been working in Sendai for over 30 years, exploring the impossible space between opposites. His painting is an intense play between transparency and opacity, between being and disappearance. He applies the tradition of Flemish lacquer painting, using dammar resin, not to create illusions but to emphasise materiality, to show that painting is both a window and a wall.

Sasaki creates "living surfaces" with gelatinous textures that both reflect and absorb light. This is painting Ma (間), the Japanese concept of intermediate space, the "active void" between forms. His paintings do not depict objects - they create a state between, a transition, a tense moment when form is not yet defined. It is a painting that does not comfort, but holds in a state of productive doubt.

The Luxembourg Art Prize is not just a competition with prizes - it is a launching pad that recognises courage, originality and artistic integrity. Each year, the jury selects three projects that are able to speak about global issues in the language of art with a personal tone.

According to the regulations of the prize, the winners receive funds without conditions of use, and most importantly, recognition backed by international criticism and museum authority.