Van Bom­mel Van Dam Prize 2026

'It bears so little resemblance to anything else'

The four nominees were selected from candidates put forward by scouts Nico Anklam, Karen Archey, Julika Bosch, Lieneke Hulshof, Xander Karskens, Maia Kenney and Berber Meindertsma. The winner was chosen by a three-member jury: artist Hadassah Emmerich, writer and art critic Hans den Hartog Jager, and Rieke Righolt, director of the Van Bommel van Dam Museum. The prize? A cash sum of 5,000 euros and the purchase of a work for the museum collection.

The jury on the winner: “At first glance, Taqwa Ali’s work is quite unruly. It is about the place you come from – not just the artist, but all of us. About the place where you are rooted, but also about the way in which an artist can have the power to imbue seemingly meaningless material with so much history and to make so many connections that everyone is taken by surprise. But perhaps Ali won above all because we are impressed by the utterly idiosyncratic path she treads – the work sometimes feels almost uncomfortable, elusive, precisely because it bears so little resemblance to anything else.”

The four nominees

Taqwa Ali (Sudan, 1997, studied in Maastricht, lives and works in the Netherlands) is an interdisciplinary artist who works with materials such as hibiscus, gum arabic, earth, clay and water. Not merely as raw materials, but as vessels for stories and memories. Her paintings, installations and sculptures explore landscapes – both in her native Sudan and in her recent places of residence in Limburg and Drenthe – as archives: shaped by displacement, ecological conditions and socio-political developments.

Cuban-born Mario Sergio Alvarez (Cuba, 1993, lives and works in Malden and Amsterdam) is an artist who creates installations, paintings and videos about the relationship between identity, memory, migration and power. He draws inspiration from his personal experiences. His best-known work is a series of symbolically painted, second-hand furniture pieces in which he explores stories of belonging and survival.

Magdalena Frauenberg (Austria, 1996, lives and works in Düsseldorf and Brussels) is fascinated by the materials from which things are made – and, above all, by how the significance of such materials can change in different circumstances and at different times. At first glance, her series of wooden busts takes you back to the history of her native Tyrol, until you realise that the sculptures have been milled by a computer. Does it matter whether such a sculpture is made by a craftsman or by a 3D printer?

Anyone who sees the work of Krystel Geerts (Netherlands, 1993, studied in Enschede and Ghent, lives and works in Amsterdam) immediately recognises her love for the physical process: handprints and traces of touch remain visible, as testimonies to the interaction. From a distance, her sculptures appear monumental and ornate, but up close they take on an earthy, soft and expressive quality. Geerts explores how environments and systems affect the body and makes those traces visible in material, space and form.

The Van Bommel Van Dam Prize 2026 is made possible with the support of: