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, 2017-2023) 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: Isabelle Bertolotti, Magali Elali and Fatima Hellberg.
More information on the jury members below.
The DISCOVERY Prize is supported by Moleskine.
DISCOVERY PRIZE 2023 WINNER
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.
DISCOVERY Prize winners
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: Harald Krejci, Brenda Guesnet and Béatrice Salmon.
More information on the jury members below.
The SOLO Prize is supported by Hiscox.
SOLO PRIZE 2023 WINNER
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.
SOLO Prize winners
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)
Learn more about our DISCOVERY Prize Jury 2023
ISABELLE BERTOLOTTI
Art historian, trained at the University of Lyon 2 and at the École du Louvre, Isabelle Bertolotti has been co-director of the Lyon Biennale since 2019 and Director of the macLYON since 2018 after she was in charge of exhibitions at macLYON since 1995. She was co-founder and artistic co-director since 2002 of Rendez-vous, an event dedicated to the emerging French and international scene recently included to the Lyon Biennale. Since 2008, it has been organising the export of the event on stages outside Europe: Shanghai in 2008 and 2010, Cape Town in 2012, Singapore in 2015, Beijing in 2017 and Havana in 2018.
Isabelle Bertolotti is also an independent curator specialising in the emerging international scene. She is president of LeGrandLarge, the association which supports young artists principally of higher art and design schools in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, and promotes relations with territorial actors.
Until 2022 she was board member of the International Biennial Association (IBA), a nonprofit association created as a platform for researching and exchanging knowledge about contemporary biennials and triennials.
MAGALI ELALI
Magali Elali is an art historian, curator and founder of The Constant Now, a network and experimental platform in Belgium for artists of color. She aims to make the arts scene more diverse and inclusive through exhibitions, institutional collaborations, lectures and the training programme POC POC that connects young artists of color with art professionals. Elali also operates as an independent curator for Museum Hof van Busleyden in Mechelen and an arts programmer at S.M.A.K. in Ghent. In her practice, she explores the paradoxes between art and social change. Magali Elali has a Masters in Art History (UGent), and previously worked at de Brakke Grond, W139, and Mu.ZEE.
Photography: Bart Kiggen
FATIMA HELLBERG
Fatima Hellberg is a curator and director of Bonner Kunstverein. She has curated exhibitions and projects in institutions including the ICA, London; Tate Modern; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; South London Gallery and Malmö Konsthall. From 2015–19, she was artistic director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Her curatorial practice is formulated in close dialogue with artists, often with more long-running exchanges.
Hellberg was previously curator at Cubitt, London, and Electra, a contemporary arts organisation with a long-running dedication to gender and feminism. She studied Visual Culture and History of Art at Oxford University and Curating Contemporary Art at Royal College of Art, London, and she has taught and lectured at Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam; Staedelschule, Frankfurt; Oxford University and the Art Academy of Düsseldorf, amongst others.
Photography: Mareike Tocha
Learn more about our SOLO Prize Jury 2023
HARALD KREJCI
Harald Krejci (1970) studied art history in Augsburg and Munich. Initially he worked as a freelance art historian in Vienna. He was Head of the Archive of the Kiesler Foundation Vienna and during this period, he curated exhibitions on Friedrich Kiesler at the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, the Drawing Center, New York, and the Kiesler Foundation Vienna. Since 2009 he has worked as curator and head of the 20th century collection in the curatorial team of the Belvedere, where he has realised numerous monographic exhibitions. Major retrospectives such as those on Joseph Beuys, Günter Brus, Rachel Whiteread and Franz West were part of this, as were the thematic exhibitions Utopia Gesamtkunstwerk, Awakening the Night, Viennese Kinetiscism and Hagenbund. Since 2018, he has been responsible for the exhibition planning for the entire Belvedere Museum as chief curator where he was recently realizing the new setup “Schau” of the permanent collection. Since January 2023 he is Managing director of the Museum der Moderne Salzburg.
BRENDA GUESNET
Brenda Guesnet (b. 1993, Bad Soden am Taunus, Germany) is Curator and Deputy Director at IKOB – Museum of Contemporary Art in Eupen, in the Germany-speaking community of Belgium. Previously, she worked in the Artist Liaison department at White Cube, London (2017 – 2020) and as Curatorial Assistant at Tenderpixel Gallery (2016 – 17), after completing an MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London (2015 – 17). Since 2015, she has been pursuing independent curatorial and writing projects, frequently as part of the curatorial collaboration ANGL.
BEATRICE SALMON
Director of the CNAP National Fine Arts Centre since 2019, Béatrice Salmon has as her essential missions: supporting the visual arts sector and further enriching, promoting and disseminating a national collection comprising nearly 107,000 works.
Béatrice Salmon, General Heritage Curator, has headed several major institutions (the FRAC of Brittany, the Museums of Nancy, the Decorative Arts Museum of Paris, etc.). She has served as Inspector of Artistic Creation (French Ministry of Culture), as Cultural and Scientific Advisor to the French Embassy in Belgium (Brussels), and as Deputy Director in charge of the fine arts at the General Directorate for Artistic Creation of the Ministry of Culture.
Photography: SteveMurez