Nicolas Lamas (Meessen De Clercq, Brussels) is awarded SOFAM Prize for Best Solo Exhibition at ART ON PAPER 2017

Nicolas Lamas’ show at Art on Paper is a discreetly balanced conversation between works that look very different, but interrelate in the way they play with how images appear on paper, and how we understand them. The velvety black, crumpled print of a starry night stands like a solid sculpture near an open atlas in which the map of a Greek mountain has been sanded off the page, leaving a blank surface and tiny heaps of dust, arranged like islands. Pages in an old copy of National Geographic have been torn out, to reveal new juxtapositions. In a large print, a leopard’s spots have been scratched but are still visible, and the artist’s blind contour drawings of photographs of archaeological excavations are depictions of fragments that fall apart as drawings as well, because the artist didn’t look at the graph paper while he was drawing.

SOFAM, the Belgian authors’ rights organisation that caters specifically to the visual arts, has awarded a special prize for the best solo exhibition at Art on Paper 2017 in Bozar in Brussels. SOFAM is committed to supporting and promoting the visual arts. With this prize SOFAM wishes to support the winning artist, as well as raising the visibility of the medium of contemporary drawing. The SOFAM prize of 2000 € was announced and awarded on September 6th at 18:00.


The jury:

•  Charlotte Beaudry (B), artist
• Aleksandra Chaushova(BG), artist
• Caroline Dumalin, (B), curator, WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels
• Loek Grootjans (NL), artist
• Koen Leemans (B), director of exhibitions, CCMechelen, De Garage
• Michel Wittock (B), collector, founder of Bibliotheca Wittockiana, Brussels