Gaston Betrand and the winners of his foundationʼs prize  

For the first time, in order to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Gaston Bertrand (1910-1994), his foundation and the Musée L are presenting the artist together with the nine winners of the Gaston Bertrand Prize, awarded since 1999. While four of them were Bertrand’s students at the painting studio of the École supérieure Saint-Luc in Brussels, all of them are "Belgian painters with a well-established inner world", as Bertrand himself wished so when defining the conditions of his prize. Indeed, they were all awarded for their highly interesting personal plastic qualities.

Gaston Bertrand, a founding member of the Jeune Peinture Belge in 1945, went through 20th-century Belgian art with a work at the borderline between abstraction and reality, offering a very personal pictorial proposal inspired by his observations of landscape, architecture and the human figure, constantly translated into their most essential and geometric expression. All at once structured and elegant, demanding and meticulous, Bertrand’s work, whether in his paintings, watercolours, drawings or engravings, has enriched modern Belgian art with its subtle plastic pro-positions arising from some ordered intuition. In praise of stylistic purity, in which Bertrand found his freedom, his work reflects the inner vision that the artist transposed onto the world for sixty years, finely captured by his eye.

Gaston Bertrand Prize winners :

• Boris Semenoff (1999)
• Francis De Bolle (2007)
• Christian Rolet (2010)
• Camille De Taeye (2012)
• Jacques Zimmermann (2014)
• Gisèle Van Lange (2016)
• Dominiq Fournal (2018)
• Denis De Mot (2021)
• bern Wery (2023)

Gaston Bertrand, Montmajour XI (detail). 1959. Watercolor on paper. 59,2 x 46,7 cm. Musée L, Louvain-la-Neuve. © Musée L