Winners of the Nordic & Baltic Young Artist Award 2025
The laureates of the Nordic & Baltic Young Artist Award 2025 were decided on 7 November during the jury meeting at Uniarts Helsinki, gathering representatives from eight art academies across the region together with additional invited experts. Marking its 10th anniversary, the Award remains the largest contemporary art competition for emerging artists in Northern Europe — providing visibility, dialogue, and cross-academic collaboration.
This year’s competition featured 154 young artists from five countries presenting 299 artworks. A selection of nominees will be exhibited in 2026 at the Uniarts Helsinki Gallery, continuing the dialogue between Nordic and Baltic art schools.
Grand Prix
Katrīna Levāne (Art Academy of Latvia)
Levāne’s interdisciplinary practice expands painting into immersive, multisensory environments combining sight, sound, scent, and touch. Her awarded work Forest Floor (2025) reflects on mortality through Latvian folklore and ecological cycles, creating a contemplative space where life and death coexist in a delicate, sensory balance.
Adam Gidlund (Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Umeå University)
Gidlund’s work moves between digital culture, identity, and decay. In The Rot (2025), a three-channel video installation, AI-generated entities trapped in a blue-screen void question meaning and control in an age of algorithms. His practice merges queerness, parody, and technological collapse to reflect instability and post-truth absurdity.
Category Awards
Painting Award – Viljamaria Raittila (Uniarts Helsinki)
Raittila’s large-scale oil paintings explore vulnerability and transience through muted tones and layered luminosity. Her awarded work Not for Long We Swim in Gloom (2025) captures the silence between presence and absence, transforming quietness into a visual state of reflection.
Photo Award – Albin Ulvebring (Umeå Academy of Fine Arts)
Ulvebring’s installation Vittra (2025) combines analog prints, screen printing, and metal elements to explore memory, loss, and inherited trauma. The work connects human fragility and ecological decay, giving voice to forgotten histories and invisible legacies.
Public Choice Award – Andra Rahe (Pallas University of Applied Sciences)
Chosen through public voting with 1,359 participants, Rahe’s series The Daycare Diary (2025) reflects on disability, care, and emotional resilience. Her autobiographical photographs turn intimate experience into shared visual culture, addressing the politics of vulnerability with empathy and strength.
Jury
The 2025 jury included leading curators, professors, and critics from the participating academies and beyond:
Andris Vītoliņš (Art Academy of Latvia), Ieva Skauronė (Vilnius Academy of Arts), Harri Monni, Anni Anttonen, and Dean Leevi Haapala (Uniarts Helsinki), Margus Meinart (Pallas University of Applied Sciences), Kaisa Maasik (Estonian Academy of Arts), Taina Erävaara and Suvi Lehtinen (Turku University of Applied Sciences), Anne Klontz (Konstfack), Per Nilsson (Umeå Academy of Fine Arts), Solvita Krese (Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art), Hólmar Hólm (Art in Iceland magazine), and Andra Orn (NOBA.ac).
For more information, see the official press release.
2025 Participants:
