This year’s Ouborg Award, The Hague’s most important visual arts award, will be presented to Aline Thomassen.
The award consists of a sum of money of €25,000 to stimulate the artist's further development and a solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag. The opening will coincide with the award presentation. The Ouborg Award is a joint initiative of the Municipality of The Hague, the Kunstmuseum Den Haag and Stroom Den Haag.
The jury was impressed by the artist’s exceptionally energetic and consistent body of work. Aline Thomassen creates powerful and colourful images of women in large-scale flowing watercolours. Her works address essential themes such as love, loss, violence, freedom, death, pain and psychological struggles. She does not shy away from contradictions.
From the jury report: ‘The anthropological view of the world is particularly interesting in her work. Thomassen is not afraid of the world around her and seeks encounters with the unknown – the other – outside her own bubble. Her works have a raw emotional impact that touches the viewer, who experiences an encounter that is inviting but also creates a kind of trepidation. It makes us curious about our fellow human beings. Her works express contradictions: the essential themes in life that are both personal and intimate and connect us as human beings.’
Aline Thomassen (1964, Maastricht) lives and works in the Netherlands and Morocco. Her work explores the many ways in which Moroccan women experience and express their identity. She is inspired by the strength and survival instinct of the women she meets. In her female figures, Thomassen attempts to give form to our complex psychological landscape. Many of her watercolours have what the Moroccan-Dutch writer Hafid Bouazza has beautifully described as a ‘cruel tenderness’. Thomassen’s exhibition in the Projects Gallery at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag provides an impressive survey of these monumental portraits in which universal themes such as the female body, motherhood, love and loss form a common thread.
Main Image: Aline Thomassen, photography: Nieck Bakker, 2024