Clara Hastrup

Mark Tanner Sculpture Award 2025-26

Exhibition: 22 May – 4 July 2026

Standpoint was pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Clara Hastrup (b. Århus, Denmark), winner of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award 2025/26.

Polyrhythms and Multigrain Vibrations brought together a new body of work by Clara Hastrup, developed since she received the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award in 2025.

The exhibition extended the artist’s ongoing investigation into sculpture as a dynamic system, connecting external forces, sound, image, and disparate materials to generate new rhythms and relationships.

Hastrup works in a variety of media that often combines analogue and digital technologies to reconfigure everyday objects, domestic materials and animate forms. Through playful transformation and material experimentation, her works invite imaginative ways of encountering the seemingly familiar.

"A fan may switch on, a string may resonate, an image may move back or forth on a screen by a frame or two or more, and we may trace it back to figure out that it was triggered by something else, which may be triggered by a sound, which may be triggered by the wind or the growth of a plant or the speed and direction of the wind or the height of the tide on the Thames. This leads to that leads to this leads to that leads to this leads to that and so on. There is sometimes a feeling of imminent collapse in the work - like everything is going off at once and it could all fall apart. Or maybe nothing will happen."
Tim Dixon

*Excerpt from a new text to accompany the exhibition written by Tim Dixon (Matt’s Gallery), and commissioned by Standpoint Gallery.

Read the full essay: Polyrhythms and Multigrain Vibrations by Tim Dixon (PDF - 144 KB)

Hastrup is the 23rd winner of the MTSA, the most significant award for emerging UK artists working in the field of sculpture. It seeks to reward outstanding and innovative practice, with a particular interest in work that demonstrates a commitment to process, or sensitivity to material. She was selected from 280 entries by a judging panel comprising: Kira Freije, Artist; Thomas Ellmer, Exhibitions Curator, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre; Rebecca Scott, Director, Cross Lane Projects and Mark Tanner Trust; and Harriet Bowman, MTSA winner 2024/25.

We are delighted to share that Polyrhythms and Multigrain Vibrations will later tour the UK as part of the MTSA’s National Touring Programme, opening at Cross Lane Projects, Kendal, Cumbria in May 2027.

Clara Hastrup (b. Århus, Denmark) lives and works in London (UK). She received her BA (Hons) in Painting and Printmaking from The Glasgow School of Art in 2016 and her Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from the Royal Academy Schools in 2021. Clara has been awarded the Danish Arts Foundation Work Grant (2025), the Artists’ Collecting Society Studio Prize (2023), the Almacantar Award (2021), and the Patricia Turner Prize for Sculpture (2021).

Recent solo exhibitions include: Fishphonics: Accelerando, MATTA, Milan, 2024; Everything Reacts, Strange Cargo, Folkestone, 2024; Organic Behaviour, LAMB Gallery, London, 2023; Fool me, fool me, Incubator22, London, 2022; Tomato Potato, Quench Gallery, Margate, 2022; and Prickly Tunes, UK Mexican Art Society, London, 2022.

Recent group exhibitions include: Moby Dick – The Whale. The Story of a Myth from Antiquity to Contemporary Art, Palazzo Ducale, Genova, Italy, 2026; Sculptural Dreams of a Summer Night, Guanajata Museum of Art and History, Leon, Mexico, 2026; Bergen Assembly: across, with, nearby, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, 2025; Mecánicas Vegetal Vol. 7, Mexico City, 2025; RISSA, MATTA, Milan, 2025; Mind to Hand, Incubator, London, 2024; Cycles, Van Gogh House, London, 2024; and Dispatches, Sans Titre, Paris, 2024.

Image: Clara Hastrup