ZEYNA© CREATIVE

The LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize was founded in 2016 with a deceptively simple premise: to find and celebrate the best contemporary craft in the world, regardless of medium, geography or art-market standing. Eleven years later, it has become something more: a barometer of where craft is going, and why it matters.

This year’s shortlist of thirty artists comes from twenty-one countries. There are ceramicists from South Korea and Colombia, a textile artist from Iceland who weaves with volcanic rock fibre, a wood carver from Ghana whose work carries the formal weight of sculpture and the intimacy of a handmade object.

What is striking about the 2026 selection is how many of the shortlisted artists are working at the intersection of craft and ecology. A Japanese lacquerware artist is using the slow, layered process of urushi — which requires the sap of a tree that takes decades to mature — as a meditation on time and sustainability. A British ceramicist is making vessels from clay excavated from urban construction sites across London, each one stamped with the grid reference of where the earth was found.

The winner will be announced at the LOEWE Foundation headquarters in Madrid on May 12th, followed by an exhibition of all thirty shortlisted works at the Casa Museo Lope de Vega. Entry is free. It is one of the best shows in Madrid this spring, and one of the least crowded.