Prizes & juries
DISCOVERY Prize
The DISCOVERY prize is awarded each year to the gallery with the best presentation in the DISCOVERY section. This section includes galleries presenting recent productions (in this case, 2018-2024) by emerging international talents. It is an important part of the Art Brussels ‘discovery’ profile. Art Brussels wishes to support the younger scene, and launched this prize in 2013, which is awarded annually on the opening day to the gallery that has made the most original and engaging presentation at the fair.
The selection is made by a professional jury. This year, the members of this jury are: Cedric Fauq, Olivia Aherne and Philippe Van Cauteren.
More information on the jury members below.
The DISCOVERY Prize is supported by Moleskine.
In awarding the DISCOVERY Prize to Lutniţa gallery (Moldova, founded in 2022), the jury recognises the quality of the presentation showcasing Diana Cepleanu (b. 1957, Romania) and Mihail Șarpe (b. 1992, Moldova). Their original approach pairs two artists from different generations, employing painting and installation through an intuitive and sensitive approach to self-portraiture. The jury agreed that the booth’s installation, balanced in its materiality, highlighted the depth of both artists’ practices with vulnerability arising from their dialogue.
Lutniţa gallery with Diana Cepleanu (RO) and Mihail Șarpe (MD)
Capsule Shanghai with Curtis Talwst Santiago
House of Chappaz (ES) & Joey Ramone (NL) with Momu & No Es
NOME (DE) with Goldin+Senneby & tegenboschvanvreden (NL) with Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen
SMAC Gallery (SA) with Georgina Gratrix
Harlan Levey Projects (BE)
BWA Warszawa (PL)
La Veronica (IT) & Maskara (IN)
Jousse Entreprise (FR)
D+T Project (BE)
SOLO Prize
The SOLO exhibitions present work by established and upcoming artists and are dispersed throughout the fair. Art Brussels wishes to encourage galleries to make distinctive statements by presenting one specific projects by individual artists. This allows visitors to discover the work of an artist in greater depth.
The best SOLO artist at the fair is rewarded with the SOLO Prize, including a cash award of €10.000. The selection is made by a professional jury. This year, the members of the jury are: Lionel Bovier, Zoe Gray and Michèle Cotton.
More information on the jury members below.
The SOLO Prize is supported by TheMerode.
The SOLO Prize was awarded to Paulo Nimer Pjota, represented by Mendes Wood DM (Brussels).
The jury was impressed by the way in which the artist brings together diverse visual references – from art history, the decorative arts and popular culture – in a visually coherent and playful whole. Seemingly effortlessly, and avoiding all didacticism, the paintings coalesce a range of sources without hierarchy. They embrace visual pleasure, skillfully playing with different aesthetic categories.
Paulo Nimer Pjota (Mendes Wood DM, Brussels)
Marcos Avila Forero (LMNO Gallery, Brussels)
Seyni Awa Camara (Baronian, BE)
Lesley Vance (Xavier Hufkens, BE)
Nicolas Party (Xavier Hufkens, BE)
Benoît Maire (Meessen De Clercq, BE)
Noémie Goudal (Les filles du calvaire, FR) & Ester Fleckner (Avlskarl, DK)
Honoré d’O (Kristof De Clercq, BE) & Germaine Kruip
(Sofie Van De Velde, BE)
Catharine Ahearn (Office Baroque, BE)
David Brognon/Stéphanie Rollin (Albert Baronian, BE)
Matt Connors (Cherry and Martin, USA)
Hannes Vanseveren (Hoet Bekaert, BE)
Fabrice Samyn (Meessen-de Clercq, BE)
Conrad Shawcross (Tucci Russo, IT)
Koen van den Broek (Figge Von Rosen, DE)
REDISCOVERY Prize
In 2024, Art Brussels will launch a new prize: the REDISCOVERY Prize.
This prize will be linked to the REDISCOVERY section of the fair and will celebrate the most underrated, underestimated or forgotten artist(s) of the 20th century.
The REDISCOVERY Prize will be awarded annually to the gallery and the represented artist(s) or their rights holder(s). They will be endowed a cash prize of €9,000. This year, the members of the jury are: Dirk Snauwaert, Edith Dekyndt and Cécile Debray.
The REDISCOVERY section aims to explore and highlight surprising, unknown and original practices that have not yet entered the mainstream of art history.
More information on the jury members below.
The REDISCOVERY Prize is sponsored by SOFAM.
The REDISCOVERY Prize was awarded to Richard Saltoun Gallery (London).
The jury has chosen to recognize the work of the Richard Saltoun Gallery for its rediscoveries in the art of the 60s and 70s and its interest in women artists. They were particularly taken by the graphic works of Myriam Bat-Yosef and TOYEN.
Richard Saltoun Gallery (UK)
INVITED Prize
In 2024, Art Brussels will launch a new prize: the INVITED Prize.
INVITED is a diverse section that champions the evolution of the art market and provides booths to young and upcoming galleries who have never participated in Art Brussels before and who stand out for their ambition, programming, and curating, and in some cases, in ways they challenge the traditional gallery model. Participants have carte blanche for their presentation at the fair.
The best INVITED booth at the fair is rewarded with the INVITED Prize, and will be endowed a voucher of €5.000 for a guaranteed participation in Art Brussels 2025. The selection is made by a professional jury. This year, the members of the jury are Kiera Blakey, Marta Dziewańska, and Frédéric de Goldschmidt.
More information on the jury members below.
The INVITED Prize is generously supported by Natan.
The INVITED Prize was awarded to Gauli Zitter (Brussels).
The jury enjoyed the presentation by two artists who formally and conceptually created an intimate and harmonious interplay in the booth. The subtle and poetic installation evokes a closed space and addresses the conditions of being an artist today.
Gauli Zitter (Brussels)
Learn more about our DISCOVERY Prize Jury 2024
PHILIPPE
VAN CAUTEREN
Philippe Van Cauteren is the artistic director of S.M.A.K. (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Ghent, Belgium.
Under his leadership, the exhibition program has mainly focused on significant monographic exhibitions of leading artists.
Philippe Van Cauteren previously worked as an independent curator and art critic, organizing exhibitions in Chile, Brazil, Mexico, and Germany. He regularly writes and teaches about contemporary art.
Photography : Thomas Sweertvaegher
OLIVIA AHERNE
Olivia Aherne is a curator from/based in the UK, currently working as Curator at Chisenhale Gallery, London. Aherne previously worked as Curator at Nottingham Contemporary where she developed new commissions by Carolyn Lazard, Meriem Bennani and Mélanie Matranga. Independently, she’s developed curatorial projects for Nir Altman, Munich (2020); Art Night, London (2019); SAFA, Shanghai; LUX Moving Image and Lewisham Arthouse, London (2018). In 2018, she was awarded the NEON Curatorial Award in partnership with the NEON Foundation and the Whitechapel Gallery, London and participated in the inaugural Shanghai Curators Lab in partnership with the 12th Shanghai Biennale.
CEDRIC FAUQ
Since September 2021, Cédric Fauq serves as chief curator at Capc musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux where his most recent projects include the collective exhibitions Barbe à Papa (Cotton Candy), Le Club du Poisson-Lune (The Moonfish Club) and the never-ending festival L’Académie des Mutantes (The Mutant Academy). At Capc, he also collaborated with artists Abbas Zahedi, Olu Ogunnaike, Sung Tieu, Aria Dean and Maxime Bichon. From 2020 to 2021, he worked as curator at Palais de Tokyo. Previously, he worked as exhibitions curator at Nottingham Contemporary. He also writes and develops projects independently.
Photography : Paris+ by Art Basel 2022
Learn more about our SOLO Prize Jury 2024
LIONEL BOVIER
Art historian Lionel Bovier (*1970) took the direction of MAMCO, Geneva’s modern and contemporary art museum, in 2016. His aim was to propose a narrative, renewed two or three times a year, of recent art history. He has thus developed a unique programming system: a “total exhibition” of sort, where temporary exhibitions interact with each other and the collection. He has also led the museum to be as much a conservatory of objects as of practices, making MAMCO quite an unusual museum in the process.
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Lionel Bovier has previously worked as an art critic and curator, starting his career by laying the foundation of an independent art space in Geneva in the 1990s (Forde) and curating in various institutions (notably Le Magasin in Grenoble and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne). In 2004, he cofounded the publishing house JRP|Ringier, quickly establishing it as an essential platform weighing in the cultural debate, by allowing exchanges of ideas between major participants of the international art world.
By postulating MAMCO as a laboratory and ambitioning to a collective rewriting of the history of the short period of time envisioned, Lionel Bovier somehow found a way to prolong his editorial activity in a museum. MAMCO, under Bovier’s direction, has in fact examined the various returns of expressivity since the 1970s; questioned the circulation of images and the different strategies that led to their transformation into an informational surface in the 2000s; analyzed the role of narrativity in the visual arts; experienced de-centering and the emergence of a world art history; envisioned decoration as a true repressed of modernism; and, lastly, explored a dialectic between how the figurative image can also question representative form, and how an abstract image may also derive from sensory experience (demanding a phenomenological response).
Photography : Annik Wetter
ZOË GRAY
Zoë Gray (UK/BE) is director of exhibitions at Bozar – Centre for Fine Arts (Brussels) since Autumn 2023. She was previously senior curator at WIELS (Brussels) from 2015-2023, where her solo exhibitions include Klara Lidén, Erik van Lieshout, Simon Denny, Rita McBride, Saâdane Afif, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Gabriel Kuri, Thao Nguyen Phan, Kasper Bosmans, Shimabuku, Marc Camille Chaimowicz and Shezad Dawood. Previously Gray was artistic director of the Rennes Biennale (FR, 2014) and worked as project manager for the LUMA Foundation (Arles, FR, 2012-2013).
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From 2006-2012, she was curator at the art space then known as Witte de With (now Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, NL), where she curated numerous exhibitions and the symposium series The Rotterdam Dialogues: Critics, Curators, Artists (2008-2009). She is a member of IKT (International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art) and from 2011-2014 was its Vice President. In recent years, she has been a member of the general assembly of La Loge (Brussels), KIOSK (Ghent), the advisory committee for Mu.ZEE (Ostend) and of various international juries and acquisition committees. She is a curatorial mentor for the American Association of Art Museums. In 2023, she was awarded the Woman of the Year Award in Culture by Elle Belgium.
Photography : Saskia Vanderstichele
MICHELE COTTON
Michelle Cotton is the Head of Artistic Programmes and Content at MUDAM, Luxembourg and the Designated Artistic Director for Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna. She was previously the Director of Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2015–2019), Senior Curator at Firstsite, Colchester (2010–2015) and recipient of the 6th Curatorial Bursary at Cubitt, London where she directed the programme from 2009 to 2010.
Photography : Wolfgang Voglhuber
Learn more about our REDISCOVERY Prize Jury 2024
DIRK SNAUWAERT
Dirk Snauwaert (Tielt, Belgium) is founding director of WIELS, since 2004. Before joining WIELS, he was Co-Director of the Institut d’Art Contemporain Villeurbanne / Rhône-Alpes, in France ; Director of the Munich Kunstverein from 1996 to 2001, and, from 1989 to 1995, curator for contemporary art at the PSK/PBAn Centre for Fine Arts Bozar, Brussels. He has organised and coordinated numerous exhibitions, both monographic and thematic, and lectures and publishes regularly on art and visual culture. He is and was a member of advisory boards.
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For WIELS, he has (co)-curated exhibitons a.o. Anne Mie Van Kerckhoven, Bruno Serralongue, Luc Tuymans, Andro Wekua, Francis Alÿs, David Claerbout, Sven Augustijnen, Rosemarie Trockel, Joëlle Tuerlinkx, Walter Swennen, Jef Geys & Monir Farmanfarmaian, Ana Torfs, Edith Dekyndt, Evelyne Axell, Rossella Biscotti, Akram Zaatari, Duncan Campbell, Ellen Gallagher with Edgar Cleijne ;, Marcel Broodthaers, Jef Geys with Charlotte Friling ; Wolfgang Tillmans – RH Quaytman with Devrim Bayar, Thea Djrodjadze with Pauline Hatzigeorgiou and thematic exhibitions Expats & Clandestines (2007), Rehabilitation (2010), Residue, The Absent Museum, Unexchangeable, « Risquons-Tout. outside of WIELS ; Idiolect, Brugge (2010), Growth and Form at Lhoist, It’s Obvious at Vanmoerkeke Art Collection.(2015), Jef Geys’ exhibition at the Belgian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennial 2009, ‘Atopolis’ for Mons 2015 European Cultural Capital, Thomas Hirschhorn ‘Pixel-Collages’ at the National Museum of Modern Art Prishtina, Kosovo (2018), Convex & Concave for the TANK Museum Shanghai and Andro Wekua for Europalia Georgia MRAH_KMKG BRU.
Photography : Jef Jacobs
EDITH DEKYNDT
Edith Dekyndt born 1960, Ieper, Belgium. Lives and works in Brussels and Berlin.
By focusing on the sculptural and painterly qualities of the mundane using time-based processes that activate change and decay, Dekyndt brings traditional formal concerns of artistic autonomy ‘down to earth’. The consequences are profound, focusing on questions of knowledge, perception, and reality by engaging the fascination and empathy of the viewer rather than ‘objective’ analysis. If her minimal style, that isolates materials subjected to chemical and physical transformations, begs comparison to scientific procedures, her aim is thoroughly ‘subjective’, orientated not to results but towards mysterious occurrence. In her work, objects come alive in a way that breaks down typical subject-object debates.
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Recent solo and group exhibitions include : Specifics Subjects, CAB Foundation, St Paul de Vence, 2024 ; Ne pas laver le sable jaune, Greta Meert, Gallery, Brussels 2023; L’Origine des choses, Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection, Paris, (2023), Aria For Inertia, Chapelle de Laennec, Paris, (2022) ; The Memory Of Everything In The World, Karin Guenther Gallery, Hamburg, (2022) ; Concentrated Form of Non-Material Energy, St Matthaüs Church, Berlin, (2022) ; Broken Drawings, Greta Meert Gallery, Brussels, (2021-2022); Nothing is Lost. Art and Matter in Transformation, GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy, (2021) ; You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet, Taipei Biennial, Taïwan, Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Riga, Latvia (2020).
CECILE DEBRAY
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Learn more about our INVITED Prize Jury 2024
MARTA DZIEWAŃSKA
Marta Dziewańska is curator at KANAL-Centre Pompidou in Brussels. Between 2019 and 2023 she was curator of the collection at Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland and between 2007 and 2018 – curator and head of research at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. In 2017 she was a curatorial advisor for documenta 14, Athens and Kassel.
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She curated and co-curated several exhibition projects: “Anecdotes of Destiny” (Kunstmuseum Bern; 2023), “miriam cahn: MA PENSÉE SERIELLE” (Palais de Tokyo, 2023), “Feliza Bursztyn: Welding Madness” (Muzeum Susch; 2021), “Things Fall Apart. Swiss Art from Boecklin to Valloton” (Kunstmuseum Bern, 2020), “MIRIAM CAHN: I AS HUMAN” (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2019), „The Other Trans-Atlantic. Kinetic and Op art in Eastern Europe and Latin America” (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2017/2018), “Alina Szapocznikow: Human Landscapes” (The Hepworth Wakefield, 2017), “Andrzej Wróblewski. Recto / Verso » (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 205/16) and others.
Editor and co-editor of (among others): Miriam Cahn: Ma pensée sérielle (2023), Tools for Utopia (2020), Points of Convergence. Alternative Views on Performance (2017), Maria Bartuszova: Provisional Forms (2015), 1968-1989. Political Upheaval and Artistic Change(2009), and others. Her writings have appeared in numerous catalogs and art magazines.
Photography : Thomas Meier
KIERA BLAKEY
Kiera Blakey is a Curator and currently Director at New Contemporaries, a long-standing artist development programme in the UK. Previous curatorial roles include at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Camden Art Centre, Nottingham Contemporary and Art on the Underground. Kiera recently curated a major new sculpture park at Compton Verney in Warwickshire.
FRÉDÉRIC DE GOLDSCHMIDT
Frédéric de Goldschmidt is a French art collector and entrepreneur based in Brussels.
After studies in business, communication and anthropology and a career in new media, real estate and film, he opened Cloud Seven, a 1,500 sq.m. coworking, exhibition and living space with works from his collection spread throughout the seven floors.
Photography : Robin De Nys