2025 short listed artists for the Jean-François Prat Prize

14th edition of the Jean-François Prat contemporary art Prize,
On June 11th 2025
Short listed artists: Syaiful Aulia GARIBALDI, Lisa JO, Toby ZIEGLER

We made a conscious decision to dedicate the 2025 edition of the Jean-François Prat Prize to abstract painting, which globally has been somewhat in the shadows over the past five years. This is an anomaly. Painting is a whole, and the richness of figurative art alone cannot represent that whole, nor can it impose a “supremacy” on it as if to reverse past judgements.

Meanwhile, abstraction continues to evolve. Since the early days of “concrete art,” the dialectic has continued to develop, and while the “abstract / not abstract” question remains present, artists have long since moved beyond it by combining the two. Today, art is concerned more with questions of process and life.

Pure life is at the heart of the work of Indonesian artist Syaiful Aulia Garibaldi, who uses science (biology, fungi, mycelium, the infinitesimal) to produce an original aesthetic of mutating forms, a metaphor for collaborations or new decompositions that describe an ephemeral way of being in the world as part of a perpetual cycle.

Lisa Jo’s practice also features digital explorations (images, colour palette, capturing the brightness of tablets) and freehand work, but that is not the heart of what she does: painting offers the only expressive framework capable of accommodating a back and forth that enfolds atomisation and the unity of memory, the mind and human bodies. What is at work here is a living entity that is always precarious, between calm and turmoil.

Toby Ziegler’s innovative process interfaces sensitive painting and digital technology, superposing them in interlocking abstract compositions in which the attentive viewer strives in vain to work out what’s going on, but ends up feeling a muted emotion due to their very efforts to interpret. At a time when the spectre of Artificial Intelligence is raising radical questions about life, we felt that his work affords an interesting angle of approach.

On June 11th, 2025, the jury will be chaired by Chris Dercon, executive director of the Fondation Cartier, with the artists supporting curators: Juliette Lecorne, Fabrice Stroun and Marc Donnadieu.

The name of the prize winning artist will be released right after the jury session at the vernissage preview night on June 11th, 2025 by 8 pm at the Bredin Prat Foundation (53 quai d’Orsay, 75007 Paris). Read more