LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize 2023

Created in 2016 by the house of Loewe at the initiative of its Artistic Director Jonathan Anderson, the LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize annually honors artists and designers for exceptional and innovative craftsmanship. In May, the prestigious award revealed its new winner, Eriko Inazaki, alongside two special mentions: Moe Watanabe and Dominique Zinkpè.

How can one handcraft the richness and precision of underwater fauna? A seemingly impossible challenge that artist Eriko Inazaki masterfully accomplished with her work Metanoia. On an oval base about twenty centimeters high, thousands of tiny, bright white particles form a polyp-like surface resembling hard coral. The ultra-realistic texture might suggest a 3D-printed plastic artifact, but its raw material is far more rudimentary.

Over more than a year of work, the Japanese ceramist sculpted the clay with scalpels, needles, and brushes to individually model hundreds of tiny particles before delicately assembling them. While this remarkable work requires extreme manual dexterity, the key to its success lies elsewhere: to prevent rapid drying, Inazaki continuously uses a steam diffuser in her studio, allowing her to work these soft, lace-like fragments layer by layer. This quintessence of craftsmanship earned the fifty-year-old artist—whose work was first revealed six years ago in a Tokyo exhibition—the prestigious LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize in May.

Nature remains an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the artists recognized this year, from their original materials to their subjects. Moe Watanabe, one of the special mentions, created Transfer Surface, a square bark vase held together by discreet rivets on all four sides. Inspired by a walk in the forest where her attention was caught by a walnut tree, the Japanese master basket weaver worked the raw surface before sewing it in the tradition of ikebana, the ancient Japanese art of floral arrangement. The other special mention went to Beninese artist Dominique Zinkpè, whose figurative paintings and sculptures reflect Beninese culture and beliefs. Continuing his previous work, Zinkpè carved hundreds of wooden figures representing the Ibéji—sacred twins in Yoruba religion—and nailed them together to form a pink and yellow wall panel. This innovative reinterpretation of a cult object, crafted by hand, captivated the jury.

Among the thirty finalists of the LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize 2023, French ceramist Claire Lindner and American designer Liam Lee also stand out. Lindner’s creations, seen last year at MO.CO and PAD, are notable for their velvety texture achieved by spray glazing stoneware after firing. Their vivid, supernatural color gradients envelop biomorphic curved volumes reminiscent of anemones, snakes, or exotic fruits, giving these works a particularly captivating look. Liam Lee offers an astonishing chair made of hand-dyed felted merino wool in saturated colors—apple green for the backrest and lilac for the seat. The textile is stretched over a sculpted wooden structure with organic shapes that seem to sprout surprising plant-like forms. These two hypersensory practices brilliantly mobilize craftsmanship to create true phantasmagorias.

Photos: Lene Bødker, Denmark, Worthy, Walking Stone and Slice of Something Bigger, glass, 2022 © LOEWE FOUNDATION • Claire Lindner, France, Buisson No. 2, glazed stoneware, 2021 © LOEWE FOUNDATION