A “new front” has been opened in abstract art, the Turner prize jurors have declared after presenting the award to a neurodiverse artist whose work they said was “erasing” the border with neurotypical contemporaries.

Nnena Kalu, a 59-year-old Scot who has learning disabilities and autism, was the surprise winner of this year’s prize. The jury praised her hanging sculptures and drawings made with “vigorous, rhythmic lines”.

Alex Farquharson, the director of Tate Britain and Turner prize jury chair, said that Kalu’s art had a “lineage from conceptual, sculptural practices” and the artist had a “clear love of material, form, rhythm and pattern … It feels very fresh to look at.”

Kalu is a fan of Abba and likes to blast disco music while she works

Farquharson said that while Kalu’s “neurodivergence” had not been the governing factor in how her creations were assessed by the jury, it was “inseparable” from the art because, given her speech limitations, it was her main form of communication.

“The jury feels her practice opens up a new front in the recent history of abstract art,” he told The Times. “I think it represents the erasure of a border that we perhaps had not been conscious enough of between neurotypical and neurodiverse artists.

“And that the same criteria and quality is applied to giving Nnena opportunities, to collecting her work, having it seen in museums, having it win prizes as one would expect to happen to other exceptional artists who happen to be neurotypical instead.”

Kalu’s installation at the Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford

CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY IMAGES

CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY IMAGES

ANDREW BENGE/GETTY IMAGES

ANDREW BENGE/GETTY IMAGES

ANDREW BENGE/GETTY IMAGES

Kalu’s work on display at Tate Britain

IVAN EROFEEV/PA WIRE

Kalu has been supported for the past 25 years by the charity ActionSpace, which provides access to creative studios for people with learning disabilities. Charlotte Hollinshead, one of her key supporters and head of artist development at ActionSpace, helped Kalu collect her prize from the magician Steven Frayne, previously known as Dynamo, in a ceremony on Tuesday night at Bradford Grammar School.

Kalu accepting the award on Tuesday night

JAMES SPEAKMAN/PA

Hollinshead said Kalu had broken “a very stubborn glass ceiling” and overcome “an incredible amount of prejudice”. She added that Kalu, who loves Abba and plays “disco music as loud as possible” while working, was a “superstar”.

An exhibition of the work of Kalu and the other shortlisted artists — Rene Matic, Mohammed Sami and Zadie Xa — is on at the Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford, as part of its UK City of Culture programme.

The jury choice again puts the Turner prize at odds with the country’s leading critics who, along with bookmakers, had in general veered towards the Iraqi-born Sami, whose exhibition of paintings at Blenheim Palace had drawn attention and plaudits.

Waldemar Januszczak, The Sunday Times critic, wrote of encountering Kalu’s “sprawling mix of lumpy sculpture” that he thought it “up there with the worst art I have seen at the Turner”.

“As opposed to the truth” by Rene Matic, a nominee

DIANA PFAMMATTER/PA

“After the Storm” by Mohammed Sami, who would have been our critic’s choice

TOM LINDBOE/PA

A work by Zadie Xa

DANKO STJEPEANOVIC/PA

Then after being told, in exhibition notes, that “Kalu is autistic” and that art was a “glorious release and therapy for her”, Januszczak wrote: “I left the room wondering who was right: the art critic judging the evidence? Or the Turner judges showing compassion and widening the definition of good art?”

• Waldemar Januszczak: The Turner prize is the cockroach of art

Farquharson, who has been jury chair for a decade, said there had been “long deliberations” between jurors and that Kalu’s victory and £25,000 winner’s cheque had been “hard won”.

The other three shortlisted artists for the prize, which since its 1984 founding has counted among its winners Damien Hirst, Steve McQueen, Antony Gormley and Lubaina Himid, each receive £10,000.

When Kalu was shortlisted earlier this year, another of the judges, Sam Lackey, the director of Liverpool Biennial, said that as the Turner prize continued to evolve, it was important that it expanded “the artistic positions and perspectives that it encompasses”.

Farquharson said that while Kalu’s neurodiversity was “inseparable” from her art, the jury’s interest had “begun from her work”.

He said the artist was not alone in only communicating through her art. “If you narrow the field to abstract artists who are neurotypical, then some write a lot about the work they make and why they make it. Others hardly anything. Jackson Pollock — there weren’t many pronouncements yet he was obviously compelled to make the work he did. These things are a spectrum rather than a binary.”

Comment: It is not the job of art to confuse therapy with talent

By Waldemar Januszczak, Chief Art Critic, The Sunday Times

In my review of the artists shortlisted for the 2025 Turner prize I wrote that the winner ought surely to be the talented, profound and highly original painter Mohammed Sami. But when you have reviewed as many Turner prize catastrophes as I have, you know full well that the best rarely wins, and that all manner of aesthetic histrionics will have played their part in the final choice. The announcement that the 2025 winner is Nnena Kalu fits that bill in spades.

Kalu’s display at the Cartwright Hall in Bradford, where this year’s show coincided with its selection as Britain’s City of Culture, was spectacularly disjointed and messy. I don’t think I have ever seen quite as dishevelled a gallery.

Her sculptures, in particular, fashioned from unwanted reams of VHS tape and endless rolls of gaffer, looked as if zero thought had gone into making them. Just wind, wind, wind; twist, twist, twist. Indeed, that was exactly the process involved. As the wall captions told us, Kalu is profoundly autistic and art for her is an outlet, an exercise and a balm.

Her drawings are marginally more satisfying, as the repetitive circling she does to create them at least fires them with obsessive rhythms. But they’re all the same. She has one mode. And cruel as it sounds, it is not the job of art to confuse therapy with talent. Nor is it the task of the Turner prize to play doctors and nurses or involve itself so flagrantly in the collection of medical Brownie points. No one really wins when the virtue-signalling leads to an artist as patently superior as Sami being ignored.