“Craftsmanship is the essence of Loewe,” said Jonathan Anderson, fashion designer, founder of JW Anderson and creative director of Loewe since 2013, when the prestigious Loewe Foundation Craft Prize was formulated in 2016 by the Spanish brand. “As a company, inside Loewe we focus on crafts in the purest sense of the term. This is the crux of our modernity, and this concept will always be fundamental.”
The 2022 edition of the prize has a jury composed of 13 outstanding figures in the worlds of design, architecture, journalism, criticism and museums, including Antonia Boström, director of the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum of London, and Abraham Thomas, curator of modern architecture, design and decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, just to name two of them. The competition’s winning entry (A Time of Sincerity by Dahye Jeong), along with that of the other 30 finalists, is on view at the Seoul Museum of Craft Art (SeMoCa), the country’s recently opened first museum on Korean crafts, from 1 to 30 July 2022.
The fifth iteration of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize presents a stimulating selection of creations that combine contemporary elements with the deepest tradition. Many of the finalists chosen this year submitted works that demonstrate exceptional understanding and mastery of historic techniques from all over the world, combined with the application of unexpected, novel materials to make items oriented towards our present, while remaining linked to the past and attempting to look into the future. The selection bears witness to the connection between man and the planet, and geometry in its natural forms.
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The 30 finalists this year hail from 15 countries and were selected from over 3,100 artisan candidates from 116 nations; their projects, made with different materials, including ceramics, wood, fabrics, cowhide, baskets, glass, metal, jewelry and lacquer, are an ode to ingenuity and skill.
Regarding the selection process, Anatxu Zabalbeascoa, executive secretary of the jury of experts of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize and a correspondent on architecture and design for El País, said: “We feel grateful and lucky to have generated such interest in this fifth edition of the prize. Among the finalists, there are works from five continents that embody the spirit of contemporary crafts, and the bridges it is building between disciplines, materials, technologies and pre-technologies. All this adds a cosmopolitan dimension to the diversity we seek with our brand, considering all the categories of craftsmanship, whose finest expression is translated into objects that are timeless, and have deep cultural roots.”
