The Prize for Work That Melts: Andy Goldsworthy and the Awkward Question of What Lasts
The Japan Art Association has named Andy Goldsworthy the 2026 Praemium Imperiale laureate for sculpture. He shares the year with Jenny Holzer for painting, Daniel Libeskind for architecture, the conductor Herbert Blomstedt for music and Cate Blanchett for theatre and film. The award is worth fifteen million yen — roughly £70,000 — and the medals will be presented by Prince Hitachi at the Meiji Kinenkan in Tokyo on 28 October. It is the thirty-seventh year of a prize that has been called, with the usual inflation, the Nobel of the arts.
Goldsworthy is seventy this year, born in Cheshire, raised in Yorkshire, resident in Dumfriesshire for decades. Most people in Britain have seen his work without necessarily knowing his name: the drystone sheepfolds scattered across Cumbria, the arches, the cairns, the slate walls that turn up in sculpture parks and on National Trust land. What almost nobody has seen is the bulk of what he has actually made, because the bulk of what he has actually made no longer exists.
An artist with almost nothing to sell
This is the genuinely interesting thing about the award, and it is worth sitting with for a moment. Goldsworthy’s core practice involves going out into a landscape, usually alone, usually early, and building something out of whatever is there. Leaves stitched together with thorns. Icicles fused with nothing but cold and spit. Stones balanced without mortar. Bracken, snow, mud, wool. He uses no glue and frequently no tools. Then he photographs it and walks away, and the tide comes in or the sun rises or the wind gets up, and the work ends.
For a commercial gallery, this is close to a nightmare. There is no object. What enters the market is the photograph, which Goldsworthy has always insisted is documentation rather than the work itself — a position that becomes slightly harder to hold each time one is framed, editioned and sold. Galerie Lelong has represented him for years and he is not a poor man. But the economic engine of his career has been public and institutional commissions rather than a stream of saleable things, and that makes him an unusual figure to see collecting the sculpture prize at an event of this kind.
Why this matters to anyone running a gallery
The instinct in the trade is to treat ephemeral practice as a lovely idea that somebody else can afford to have. Galleries need inventory. Collectors need something to insure. Any dealer who has tried to place a performance, a time-based installation or a work that requires annual maintenance knows how quickly the conversation turns to logistics and how rarely it survives them.
What Goldsworthy demonstrates is not that the problem is imaginary but that it is solvable by other means. His career has been built on relationships with landowners, councils, trusts and commissioning bodies rather than on art fair booths. The sheepfolds project ran for years under a local authority arts programme. The cairns and walls sit on estates and in parks. When a museum wants him — his Stone Sea Passage went into Mona in Hobart two years ago — it commissions rather than buys.
That model is quietly available to a great many artists who assume the only route is representation and resale. It requires patience, a tolerance for planning applications and a willingness to work where the audience already is rather than where the money is. It is not glamorous. It has kept one of the most recognisable British sculptors of the last forty years working continuously since the late 1970s.
The uncomfortable part
There is a critique of Goldsworthy that surfaces regularly and deserves an airing. It runs that the work is pretty rather than difficult, that the photographs flatten genuinely strange encounters into something close to landscape calendar imagery, and that the reverence for nature sits oddly with a practice heavily dependent on aerial documentation, four-wheel drives and international commissioning budgets. Some of this lands. The photographs really are the weakest part of the proposition, and the gift shop afterlife of the images has done him no favours with critics who came of age suspicious of beauty.
The counter-argument is that the ephemerality is not decorative. Goldsworthy has been consistent for four decades that decay is the subject rather than an unfortunate side effect — that a work which survives the afternoon has told you something a permanent one cannot. Set against the monumental impulse of most Land Art, the American earthworks tradition of moving vast quantities of desert with heavy machinery, his position looks less like modesty and more like an argument.
Where to see it
The practical answer for anyone in Britain who wants to look properly is to go outside. Yorkshire Sculpture Park has held his work. Cumbria has the sheepfolds, scattered deliberately so that finding them takes effort. Various National Trust and estate commissions dot the country. None of it is a substitute for the gallery, and none of it is on a wall.
That is probably the point of giving him the prize. The sculpture award has gone to an artist whose best work dissolved years ago, and the committee knew it.
The 2026 Praemium Imperiale will be presented in Tokyo on 28 October 2026.