John Moores Painting Prize 2025: Deborah Grice wins Visitors’ Choice for Safehold

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North Lincolnshire artist Deborah Grice takes the John Moores Painting Prize 2025 Visitors’ Choice Award and its £2,025 public prize Walker Art Gallery and the John Moores Painting Prize Trust have announced Deborah Grice as the winner of the John Moores Painting Prize 2025 Visitors’ Choice Award for her painting Safehold. Based in North Lincolnshire, Grice receives £2,025 in the audience-led prize, sponsored by Rathbones, after visitors voted in their thousands at one of the UK’s most closely watched contemporary art exhibitions. In a year when the public gravitated towards paintings that reward attention, Safehold stood out for its quiet insistence. In daylight, the small canvas reads as a restrained landscape: a scene held in balance, recognisable and calm. Then the gallery’s choreography shifts. Under UV light torches provided by gallery assistants throughout the exhibition, a luminous geometric structure emerges from the same surface, turning the image into a double exposure of serenity and systems. Deborah Grice and her winning work, ‘Safehold’ Credit: © National Museums Liverpool Visitors responded to that sleight of hand and the mood it carries. Many praised the work for, “the sharp contrast between light and dark”, and how, “it is so atmospheric and delicately painted using wonderful colour”. One visitor commented, “It feels authentic. I can feel, imagine, and see what is going on. Story intertwined with art.” Another said how, “It fills me with peace. Grice devised a technique that combines phosphorescent pigment with oil paint on a single surface, allowing the composition to operate as two images at once: one rooted in pastoral familiarity, the other edged with a latent architecture. That push and pull between comfort and unease is central to her practice. She describes how we live in, “a state of flux, caught between nostalgia for a more innocent past and the complexities of the present.” In Safehold, the concealed structure figures what she calls, “our longing for security and refuge.” Deborah Grice, ‘Safehold’ 2025 © Deborah Grice Credit: © Deborah Grice The 2025 jury selected 71 paintings from over 3,000 entries, reflecting the breadth of contemporary painting in the UK today. Ally Fallon won first prize in September 2025 for If You Were Certain, What Would You Do Then?, which has since been acquired for Walker Art Gallery’s collection. The John Moores Painting Prize 2025 exhibition closes on 1 March 2026 at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Past Visitors’ Choice winners include Donal Moloney 2016, Gary Lawrence 2018, Kiki Xuebing Wang 2020, and Nicholas Baldion 2023. Sir Peter Blake is Patron of the Prize. The Prize returns to Walker Art Gallery in 2027 for its 70th anniversary, coinciding with 150 years of the gallery. Learn more ©2026 Walker Art Gallery,

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