Joost Vandebrug, Emerging Artist Award at Art Madrid’26

Art Madrid has held its 21st edition at the Glass Gallery of the Cibeles Palace and has established itself as one of the standout events of Madrid Art Week. Its proposal brought together 35 national and international galleries and offered a journey open to different languages, formats and perspectives within contemporary art.

Alongside the exhibition programme, the fair promotes different support initiatives through its patronage programmes. One Shot Hotels, official sponsor of Art Madrid’26, reinforces its commitment to the One Shot Hotels Emerging Artist Award, a recognition designed to give visibility to and promote new voices with remarkable potential within the current scene.

In this edition, the award went to Joost Vandebrug, a multidisciplinary artist trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. His work begins with photography, but expands into other visual languages to play with memory, recollection and the limits of the traditional image.

“I have always been drawn to the distance that exists between something and the way it is remembered. Memory is never stable, and that instability interests me a great deal”.

Your work often moves between photography, film and installation. How do you decide which medium is the most appropriate for each idea?

“For me, it does not usually begin with the medium. It begins with a certain feeling or a way of looking that I want to preserve. Then the question becomes: what form can best hold that? Sometimes it is a photograph, sometimes a moving image, and at other times something more spatial or fragmented within an installation.

It is true that much of my work has some photographic element, but I am not so interested in it as a fixed image on its own. I am more interested in how an image can unfold over time, through rhythm, repetition, material, distance or the movement of the viewer”.

Memory and transformation seem to play an important role in your work. Was there any particular moment or experience that sparked that interest?

“I have always been drawn to the distance that exists between something and the way it is remembered. Memory is never stable, and that instability interests me a great deal. The image changes, fragments and over time becomes something else. I think that is why transformation is so present in my work. Not as an effect, but as a condition. Things are always in the process of becoming something different. It can be an image, a landscape, a material or even the act of looking itself. I am less interested in capturing something definitively than in remaining close to that state in which it is still taking shape”.

How would you describe your creative process and how has your work evolved to bring you to this point?

“It is tied, above all, to travel, because my works are built from memory. Photography is part of the process, and some people may think that what they are seeing is a photograph. And, in part, that is true. I take many photographs while travelling, but each work is made up of many different images that come together to reconstruct a memory. It is much more the memory of a place than a literal description of a photograph”.

How do you think contemporary art connects with the urban and cultural experiences of a city like Madrid?

“Art in the city is everything. We see it everywhere, and that is one of the best things about any city: finding art, discovering it in places where you might not expect it, or going to more obvious places such as a contemporary art museum.

Art is a very important part of any city, and one of the main reasons why I like visiting different cities. It is part of the city’s identity, with artists having shaped many of them: young artists, established artists… I mean, find your artist and you will find a good experience”.

Many emerging artists struggle to gain visibility at the beginning of their careers. What helped you the most when you were starting out?

“Honestly, I think what helped me the most was to keep working and try to make the work more and more precise. Visibility is important, of course, but it comes and goes, and if you focus too much on that too early it can become quite complicated. For me, it was more important to keep building something that had its own logic and its own necessity”.

Looking ahead, are there themes or lines of work that you feel especially close to and would like to keep exploring?

“Yes, definitely. I feel increasingly drawn to works that delve into instability, slowness and the limit, or even beyond the limit, of recognition. I am interested in images that are not fully there yet, or that perhaps never fully settle. That remains very alive for me.

I also want to continue exploring material transformation more deeply and the relationship between the intimate and the monumental, between something very small and fragile and something immersive or spatial. Many of the themes remain the same, such as time, perception, memory or fragmentation, but I hope they continue to open up into a slightly different form each time”.

With this edition, Art Madrid once again reaffirms its role as a platform that drives contemporary art and the voices that are defining its present and future.

For One Shot Hotels, being part of this context through the One Shot Hotels Emerging Artist Award means continuing to support a living, diverse and constantly transforming form of creation. The recognition of Joost Vandebrug highlights a body of work with its own perspective, sensitive and open to new ways of understanding image, memory and the artistic process.

If you want to continue discovering Joost Vandebrug’s work and his projection within contemporary art, visit KANT Gallery and Bildhalle, spaces that help give international visibility to his artistic career.