The Chanel Culture Fund has revealed the names of the ten artists who will each receive €100,000 as winners of the Chanel Next Prize 2026. Now in its third edition, the biennial prize also includes a two-year mentorship programme.
This year’s recipients, who come from ten different countries and a range of disciplines, are Álvaro Urbano, Ambrose Akinmusire, Andrea Peña, Ayoung Kim, Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, Emeka Ogboh, Marco da Silva Ferreira, Pan Daijing, Payal Kapadia and Pol Taburet. Apart from representing the visual arts, they include a jazz trumpeter (Akinmusire), filmmaker (Kapadia) and a dancer (Da Silva Ferreira, a former elite swimmer who won Portugal’s version of the reality television show "So You Think You Can Dance" in 2010 and is now an established choreographer).
“The artists are free to use the money as they wish. There are no restrictions. The idea is to give the recipients resources, time and space to extend their practice and relationships with their peers,” says Yana Peel, the president of arts, culture and heritage at Chanel. “I take direction from the avant-garde spirit of Gabrielle Chanel who worked with [Sergei] Diaghilev and [Pablo] Picasso, and believed in a non-hierarchical view of art practice.” The winners' first stop as a group will be a visit to Venice during the vernissage of the Art Biennale in May.
Hana Omori, part of the art collective Keiken which received the prize in 2022, agrees that meeting artists from other disciplines was one of the most stimulating parts of the prize—for example, fellow prize winner Jung Jae-il, who composed the soundtrack for the film Parasite. “Keiken was also put together with a great mentor, Legacy Russell, the American curator and writer,” Omori tells The Art Newspaper. Omori admits, however, that suddenly being solvent was equally important. “It allowed us to take greater risks and make larger scale work,” she says.
The Chanel Next Prize is not necessarily aimed at emerging artists. Kim received the $100,000 LG Guggenheim Award in 2025, while the French painter Taburet received the Reiffers Art Initiatives Prize in 2022 and his work is in the Pinault Collection. “Supporting artists at this stage recognises that artistic development doesn’t plateau but continues to evolve through exchange, risk and experimentation,” says Alvin Li, a curator of international art at London's Tate Modern, who along with the chief executive of the British Film Institute, Ben Roberts, joined the jury of Peel, the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artist Cao Fei and the actor Tilda Swinton for this year's prize.
