In 2026, we awarded the fourth Antwerp Art Graduation Prize. With this prize, Antwerp Art seeks to support the development of young artists not yet associated with any organisation. Every year, two students with a master’s degree in fine arts are selected based on their graduation projects: one from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp (KASKA) and one from Sint Lucas Antwerp (SLA). The Graduation Prize consists of a cash prize and an exhibition of new work during Antwerp Art Weekend.

The 2026 laureates that will be exhibiting their work are Nora Sacré (KASKA) and Lucas de la Rubia (SLA). Stay tuned, because we will announce more details on their presentations during the Antwerp Art Weekend 2027 soon!

In 'The Carousel', she transforms a familiar domestic setting into a sculptural environment. Combining ceramic, wood, metal, and live performance, the bedroom installation unfolds as a shifting landscape of repetition, memory, and transformation. Things rotate, accumulate, disappear, and reappear. In The Carousel, nothing settles into a fixed state; meaning emerges through the continual negotiation between what moves and what remains.

Working at the intersection of sculpture and performance, Nora Sacré creates immersive installations in which material, movement, and duration become active elements of the work. Her work inhabits the space where material begins to perform and performance leaves material traces behind. 

'Never louder than my knees' begins with a paradox: how a body, after thinking too much about its own movements, ends up paralysing itself. An emergency staircase functions as a space of fiction, holding the remnants and fragments of a story that is never told in full. Landscapes accumulate on the concrete, drawn and redrawn from memory; a silver olive tree rotates slowly, a three-dimensional scan hovering between presence and model, between the real and its copy. A lightbox holds the image of a foot. Silicone moulds sit inside plastic crates, like fish in a market. Together, these fragments do not explain an event. They circle it. Something was transmitted here, something stopped mid-movement, something was left behind by someone who had to go.

Lucas de la Rubia grew up in Madrid and lives in Antwerp, splitting his time between the studio and teaching. As a teenager, he was moved by Goya's drowning dog. His work has always oscillated in the dualities that painting holds. Each piece comes from a tension between the desire for the uncontrollable and a self-imposed formal demand, leading him to work across media. He wants the material to resist recognition. He returns again to situations that live only in memory, reconstructing them through fragments the body keeps, and to spaces that have disappeared, naming what has been silenced, doubting memory's own representation.

Antwerp Art would like to thank the following spaces for supporting the 2026 Antwerp Art Graduation Prize:

Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Base-Alpha Gallery, Eva Steynen Gallery, Gallery FIFTY ONE, Gallery Sofie Van de Velde, IBASHO, Keteleer Gallery, MASEREEL, MORPHO, Newchild, Pizza Gallery, Rik Rosseels Gallery, Shoobil, and Tim Van Laere Gallery.