The Walker Art Gallery has announced Manchester-based artist Ally Fallon as the winner of the John Moores Painting Prize 2025. At just 27, Fallon becomes the youngest artist to secure the award since its founding in 1957, taking the £25,000 prize for his painting If You Were Certain, What Would You Do Then?
The John Moores, long regarded as the UK’s most significant painting award outside London, has built its reputation on anonymous judging and a roll call of winners with a history of post-war British painting — Peter Doig, Lisa Milroy, Rose Wylie, Graham Crowley. Fallon now joins that lineage with a work described by this year’s jury as possessing “a deceptive simplicity” and “nuanced humour.”
For the artist, the win is also personal. “It was only a few years ago that I first came here as a student,” Fallon reflected at the Walker. “To now see my painting on the wall feels momentous. Paint has a way of capturing experience that nothing else can. And for those of us based outside London, the John Moores remains a genuine beacon.”
A graduate of Manchester School of Art and Apollo Painting School, Fallon has already cut his teeth through residencies — notably Joya: AiR in Spain — and a string of group shows from HOME, Manchester, to Boomer Gallery in London.
Alongside Fallon, four other artists received commendations: Davina Jackson (Just Like It Was), Katy Shepard (Bedscape2), Miranda Webster (laid out), and Joanna Whittle (Darkened Heart).
The evening also saw David Caines named the winner of the Lady Grantchester Prize for Monstrous Endeavour, a painting he describes as a meditation on the “obsessional and often unsuccessful compulsion to make art.” The award provides £5,000, a residency, and support from Winsor & Newton.
The 2025 John Moores Painting Prize exhibition brings together 71 works, selected anonymously by a panel including Louise Giovanelli, Gemma Rolls-Bentley, Michael Simpson, Dr Zoé Whitley, and Zhang Enli. Running from 6 September 2025 to 1 March 2026, the show also includes recent winners from the John Moores Painting Prize China, reinforcing the prize’s international dialogue. Visitors will again be able to vote for the Rathbones-sponsored Visitors’ Choice Award.
Now in its 32nd edition, the Prize continues to define the shifting language of contemporary painting, affirming Liverpool as a city where painting still matters.