25 – 28 April 2024
Brussels Expo

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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.

This year’s DISCOVERY Prize is being awarded to Capsule Shanghai for their presentation with Curtis Talwst Santiago. The jury was convinced by the carefully considered conceptual and spatial development of an exhibition within the format of a fair. Drawing on themes around the carnival, Curtis Talwst Santiago opens up a rich series of reflections around collectivity, transcendence, joy, cultural exchange and the inversion of structures of high and low. These strands are formulated across sculpture, painting and installation within a language of striking visual immediacy and energy.

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 Marcos Avila Forero represented by LMNO Gallery (Brussels).
Marcos Avila Forero, born in 1983, lives between Paris and Bogota. The jury was convinced by the engagement of the artist within the social and political context in Columbia, more specifically the rural community and their struggle for their land and their rights. His social engagement is translated very precisely into various artistic techniques (photography, drawings, video) going beyond the documentary dimension. The gallery LMNO (Brussels) presents his work in an unpretentious open display which allows the  visitors to partake in the artist’s concerns.   

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), including 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.

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.

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). 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. 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.

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

Appointed President of the Picasso National Paris museum in November 2021, Cécile Debray, general curator of Heritage, was Director of the Musée de l’Orangerie from May 2017 to November 2021. She was also in charge of modern collections at the Paris National Modern Art Museum / Centre Pompidou from 2008 to 2017, scientific advisor to the General Administrator of the RMN, in charge of programming at the National Galleries of the Grand Palais, from 2005 to 2008, curator at the Paris Modern Art Museum from 2000 to 2005, and Director of the Châteauroux Museum from 1997 to 2000.

Curator of several major international exhibitions, such as :
Prehistory, a modern enigma (Centre Pompidou, May-Sept. 2019), The Black Model. from Géricault to Matisse (Musée d’Orsay, Paris, March-July 2019; Mémorial de l’esclavage, Pointe-à-Pître, Sept.-Dec. 2019) ; Derain, 1904-1914, a radical decade (Centre Pompidou, Oct. 2017-Jan. 2018), The Balthus retrospective (Rome, Scudiere dell Quirinal, Villa Medicis, Rome 2015; Vienna, Kunstforum, 2016) ; Marcel Duchamp, the paint itself (Paris, Centre Pompidou, 2014) ; Matisse. Pairs and series (Paris, Centre Pompidou, 2012 ; Copenhagen SMK; New York, MET 2013); Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso… The Stein adventure (San Francisco, SFMoMA; Paris, Grand Palais, 2011; New York, MET, 2012); Elles@Centrepompidou, 2009 (Paris, Centre Pompidou, 2009/2011; Seattle, SAM, 2012/13; Rio, CCBB, 2013),  New realism, 2007 (Paris, Grand Palais; Hanover, Sprengel Museum).


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Since 2016, she is also founder and curator of the annual art residency festival Viva Villa ! (Villa Medicis, Villa Kujoyama, Casa de Velazquez), President of AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions), member of several boards of directors (EPMO, Giverny Musée de l’Impressionnisme, AWARE), part juries and art competitions (Art Olympia Prize, Tokyo, 2015; Canson Prize, 2013, Institut d’Études Supérieures d’Art, École du Louvre, president of the jury of the International film and art book, Filaf 2020…. ), member of scientific and artistic committees (Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, USA, curatorial seminar ; Centre National du Livre, art books committes, Casa de Velazquez / Académie des Beaux-Arts, FIAC Tuileries, CIMAM – International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art – Revue de l’Art editorial Committee).

She designed and implemented the scientific and cultural project and exhibition program for the Musée de l’Orangerie. She orchestrated the new presentation of the Musée de l’Orangerie collections in renovated spaces (September 2020), created new contemporary programs,
Contrepoints (Otobonk Nkanga, Alex Katz, Janaina Tschape, Isabelle Cornaro, David Hockney… ) and Danse dans les Nymphéas (Carolyn Carlson, Trisha Brown Dance Company, François Chaignaud…) which, along with the temporary exhibitions, won the loyalty of a new, younger audience and put the museum on the Paris cultural map and its tourist industry. Also, before the health crisis, in 2018 and 2019, attendance at the Musée de l’Orangerie exceeded one million visitors annually.

At the Musée national Picasso-Paris, she launched a new project based on the exceptional collections acquired from the artist’s estate (by dation). Coordinating the Picasso Celebration in 2023, for the fiftieth anniversary of the painter’s death, she initiated a reflection on the current, discussed reception of Picasso through the seminar
Picasso today broadcast by podcasts (France Culture), a program of exhibitions on new, historical or contemporary and more inclusive aspects (ORLAN Weeping wom are angry, 2022 ; Faith Ringgold 2023 ; Sophie Calle, 2023 ; Léonce Rosenberg’s apartment exhibition, 2024 ; Picasso iconophage, 2024, or Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso. The invention of langage, Musée du Luxembourg, which she is curating). Starting in 2024, the Picasso Museum will incorporate a new Picasso Study Center, which will provide access to the museum’s vast archive (200,000 items), documentation and library, and give impetus to renewed research into the figure and work of Picasso.

Photography : Bernard Martinez

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