The celebrated performance artist Marina Abramović has received the 2025 Praemium Imperiale Award for sculpture, while the leading figurative painter Peter Doig has won the award for painting. Both receive a 15 million yen (£77,000) honorarium. They are among five international recipients of the award, which is presented by the Japan Art Association, under its honorary patron Prince Hitachi, the younger brother of the Emperor Emeritus of Japan.
The other winners, all of whom have a connection to the UK, are the Belgian film-maker Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker for theatre and film; the Hungary-born pianist András Schiff for music; and the Porto-born Eduardo Souto De Moura for architecture. The National Youth Theatre (NYT) is selected for the 2025 Grant for Young Artists.
Chris Patten, the politician and former chancellor of the University of Oxford and the Praemium Imperiale’s international advisor in the UK, said in a statement: “All five laureates this year have close ties to the UK. They all share a love of ‘making’—whereby concept and craft come together to create artistry of the highest order. I am also delighted that the Japan Art Association will celebrate our very own National Youth Theatre, who will be celebrating their 70th anniversary next year.”
Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present, 2010, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York Photo: Marco Anelli. Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives
Abramović, the Belgrade-born superstar, has been a gamechanger in rethinking the relationship between performance artists and audience. She has exhibited around the world, winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in both 1997 and 2005. Her solo show at London’s Royal Academy of Arts (2023)—which is due to tour Europe until 2026— saw her become the first woman in the RA’s 250-year history to occupy the entire gallery space. In one of her defining pieces, The Artist is Present (2010), she famously sat in place for three months, eight hours a day, while a succession of visitors to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, came to sit opposite her. ”It was a complete surprise,” she said, “this enormous need of humans to have contact”.
Peter Doig, Alice at Boscoe’s (2014-23) ©️ Peter Doig
The Edinburgh-born, London-based artist Doig is known as a leading practitioner of the “New Figurative Painting”. As a child he moved with his family first to Trinidad and then to Canada. After studying at Wimbledon, Central Saint Martin’s and Chelsea art schools in London in the 1980s he made his way back to Trinidad where he created the evocative, dreamlike paintings that made his name as a colourist. In a three-decade international career, he has had important exhibitions at Tate Britain (2008), the Fondation Beyeler (2014-5), the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo (2020) and the Courtauld Gallery in London (2023). In 2023-24, he curated Reflections of the Century at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. In October his show House of Music—which will feature new and recent paintings set alongside a sound installation , and reflect music’s influence on his practice—opens at the Serpentine in London.
The Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Mour—noted for projects in his home country including the Braga Stadium (2004), in Braga, north of Porto and Casa das Histórias Paula Rego (2008) in Cascais, near Lisbon—won the Pritzker Prize for architecture in 2011. He designed the Serpentine Pavilion, in London, in collaboration with Álvaro Siza, in 2005, and showed at the Royal Academy of Arts as part of the Sensing Spaces exhibition in 2014.
The Praemium Imperiale Awards have been given annually since 1989 to cover fields of achievement not represented by the Nobel Prizes. The laureates are selected from a list submitted by international advisers to the Japan Art Association.
