TORONTO.- The Gershon Iskowitz Foundation announced Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun as the recipient of the 2025 Gershon Iskowitz Prize. The $75,000 award is presented annually to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to the visual arts in Canada. In addition to the Prize, the Foundation will generously support a solo exhibition of his work at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in February 2027.

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun is an artist and activist based in Vancouver who is known for combining traditional Coast Salish cosmology and motifs with formal tropes borrowed from surrealism and pop art. The resulting grand-scale paintings address contemporary political urgencies, including paying witness to the horrors of colonial violence, increasing respect for the land and environmental care, and demanding justice and sovereignty for Indigenous Peoples. His paintings are striking for their use of acrid tones—suggesting toxicity, post-apocalyptic ruin, and natural worlds sickened by industrial exploitation. These fantastical landscapes are populated by masked figures whose geometry exemplifies an artistic philosophy that he dubs “Ovoidism.” Drawing lessons from the recurring oval forms in Northwest Coast designs, he has built his own visual language in which these shapes may embody limbs, branches, eyes, clouds, teeth, mountains, or fish.

The jury for the 2025 Gershon Iskowitz Prize was composed of guest jurors Crystal Mowry (Director of Programs at the MacKenzie Art Gallery) and Adelina Vlas (Artistic Director, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery) alongside Gershon Iskowitz Foundation members Sarah Milroy (Executive Director and Chief Curator, McMichael Canadian Art Collection) and Stephan Jost (Michael and Sonja Koerner Director, and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario).

2025 Jury Member Adelina Vlas notes: “Through his paintings, the artist seeks to amplify the voice of communities that have been relegated to the reduced confines of reservations and portray not only the realities of the contemporary Indigenous condition but also visions of possible futures.”

A highly regarded figure, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s work has had a profound impact on Canadian visual culture and the increased visibility of Indigenous Contemporary Art internationally. Lauded as a “unique and persistent voice for change” when he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2019, the artist continues to innovate within his form, connecting his role as an artist to the larger project of Indigenous resilience and cultural recovery.

Born in Kamloops, BC, in 1957, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun is of Cowichan (Hul’q’umi’num Coast Salish) on his father’s side and Okanagan (Syilx) heritage on his mother’s. As a child, he attended one of the many Canadian Indian residential schools designed to suppress Indigenous cultural practice. His political consciousness is rooted in a family history of Indigenous rights advocacy. Yuxweluptun’s artwork has been displayed in numerous international group and solo exhibitions, including Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada in 2013, as well as the first exhibition of contemporary First Nations art held in that same institution in 1992, titled Land, Spirit, Power. In 1998, Yuxweluptun was the recipient of the Vancouver Institute for the Visual Arts (VIVA) Award. He was also honoured in 2013 with a prestigious Fellowship at the Eitelijorg Musem of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, which was accompanied by an exhibition, a publication, and the entry of his artwork into the museum’s permanent collection. He earned a BFA in 1983, and in 2019 he received an Honorary Doctorate from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. He lives and works in Vancouver, where he is represented by Macaulay + Co. Fine Art.