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Candidates
2025
Ars Fennica 2025 candidates announced.
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Art Expert
2025
The Art Expert 2025 announced.
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Emilija Škarnulyte
Ars Fennica 2023
Emilija Škarnulytė from Lithuania won the 2023 Ars Fennica award.

Candidates 2025

Jury has chosen ARS FENNICA Award Nominees for 2025.

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- Candidates -

2025

ARS FENNICA Candidates 2025

Ragna Bley

Norway

Ragna Bley’s large paintings are characterised by organic and fluid forms that leave room for chance and unpredictability. Her art oscillates between the representational and the enigmatic. Distinctly experimental, her work also includes sculptures and performances wherein language and text are important components. Spatiality plays an important role in experiencing Bley’s work. For instance, a series of paintings might be hung on wires, floating back-to-back across the room, creating unique conditions for viewing and experiencing.

Roland Persson

Sweden

Nature is depicted in Roland Persson’s painterly silicone sculptures and large-scale installations with an ambiguous tension, balancing destruction and creation. His representations of reality often blend in surreal, dreamlike elements, with plants and animals appearing distorted and mistreated by humanity. Persson’s work features objects or fragments of nature to which he has a special connection or with which he grew up. The subject can also be stories or fantasies that are loaded with something that concerns him personally.

Jani Ruscica

FINLAND

Jani Ruscica works across mediums of moving and printed image, sculpture and performance. Central to the artist’s practice is the slippage and simultaneity of meaning animated by forms that move, stretch, shape-shift, and exceed the borders of time, space, and bodies. Working with fragmentary signs or images we think we already know, Ruscica deploys the pseudo-familiar to undermine immediate legibility in favour of precarious, improvisational processes.

Hanna Vihriälä

Finland

The sense of material is the driving force in the art works by sculptor Hanna Vihriälä. She uses materials otherwise rarely seen in art, such as candy, gravel, and acrylic beads, which she strings together by hand on steel wires to create large, suspended, airy works. These pieces require meticulous craftsmanship, often comprising up to 350,000 acrylic beads that form a rigorous yet vibrant surface. Her works exhibit a tension between different contrasts like durability and fragility, or hard and soft.

Exhibition

A joint exhibition showcasing the nominees’ works will be on display at HAM Helsinki Art Museum from October 24, 2025, to March 15, 2026. The winner will be announced in the spring of 2026. The public can also vote for their favorite at the exhibition.

Award Panel

Emilija Škarnulyte

ARS FENNICA 2023

“The decision to give the Award to Emilija Škarnulytė is based on the unique approach that she has demonstrated in her films and immersive installations. Her work is deeply complex in terms of both content and methodology, covering topics such as climate change, extraction, and extinction in ways that combine critical analysis with a searching imagination.”

Anne Barlow, Art expert invited by award panel

From the archive

More Artists

Randomly chosen candidates from our archive spanning 30 years.
2021
Viggo Wallensköld

Viggo Wallensköld

Viggo Wallensköld Candidates 2021 Viggo Wallensköld, depicts life’s absurdity through a series of fictional characters. Over the years, his works, which typically feature just one

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2025
ARS FENNICA

Jani Ruscica

Jani Ruscica Candidates 2025 Jani Ruscica works across mediums of moving and printed image, sculpture and performance. Central to the artist’s practice is the slippage

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2025
ARS FENNICA

Ragna Bley

Ragna Bley Candidates 2025 Ragna Bley’s large paintings are characterised by organic and fluid forms that leave room for chance and unpredictability. Her art oscillates

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First ARS Fennica candidates 1991

About Us

ARS FENNICA -foundation

The Henna and Pertti Niemistö Art Foundation – ARS FENNICA sr was established in 1990 to promote the arts by opening up new channels for Finnish visual art internationally, by providing artists with inspiration in their creative work, and by encouraging interest in and respect for the visual arts among the general public.

In alternate years, the Foundation awards Finland’s most significant visual-art prize – 50,000 euros. The prize goes to an artist in recognition of individual artistic work of outstanding quality.