WINNERS
2025-2026
Congratulations to the 6 winners of the first edition of the Bastille Art Prize!
This year's prize was met with great enthusiasm, bringing together a large number of participants who came to share the richness and diversity of their artistic approach. We would like to warmly thank each and every one of them for the exceptional quality of their submissions, which made the jury's work both fascinating and demanding.
The artistic level proved to be particularly high, demonstrating remarkable creativity, profound sensitivity, and great mastery of technique. Faced with the breadth and quality of the works presented, the jury made the exceptional choice of awarding not five, but six winners, whose unique worlds resonate with and complement one another, powerfully embodying the vitality of contemporary creation: a huge congratulations to Clara Tournay, Laura Mateare, Sophie Inard, Valentine Dardel, Valentina Grilli, and Anne-Juliette Deschamps.
These award winners were exhibited at the Galerie Bessaud from January 15 to February 21, 2026, following an opening reception in the presence of the juries on Thursday, January 15.
Thank you again to all the participants for your incredible work.
Arthur Bessaud, creator of the Bastille Art Prize
Clara Tournay
Clara Tournay works with different media to explore the idea of the underworld.
Paintings, sculptures, and installations make light, matter, and temporality tangible. They highlight different ways of giving form to the invisible and, through wonder, revealing the social and ecological phenomena that permeate our territories.
Her approach, which blends scientific rigor, spirituality, and myths, acts as a warning signal.
Laura Mateare
Laura Mateare blends her childhood passions in her work: silk painting and embroidery.
She finds great freedom in creating her materials, sometimes mixing linen and cotton with silk. These blends, combined with embroidery, allow her to capture the texture of the life around her.
Inspired by her parents' Italy, Yasmine Mei's flowers, Baudelaire's poetry, overripe market fruits, empty chairs waiting for an encounter, it is a sweetness of life that she seeks to immortalize through her paintings
Sophie Inard
Sophie Inard repurposes objects associated with power by wrapping them in crocheted stitches.
Through this gesture, she confronts the symbols of power and plays with contrasts: strength and vulnerability, spectacle and intimacy, individual and collective.
Crochet, long associated with women's domestic work, becomes here a tool for dialogue between worlds. By covering sporting objects, trophies, or weapons, she questions how our societies represent power, victory, and protection. Each stitch weaves a link between past and present, between craftsmanship and performance, between what unites and what divide
Valentine Dardel
Valentine Dardel explores the female body as a territory for visual experimentation, through slow compositions created from digitally reworked photographs or more instinctive imprints, where the material retains the raw trace of movement. Her practice is permeated by a constant attention to light, folds, and texture.
Trained in textile design, she approaches draping as a language: a way to sculpt the body without exposing it directly. Her works celebrate soft forms, curves, and skin. It is a sensitive and experimental style of painting, where intimacy becomes a space to be shared
Valentina Grilli
Valentina Grilli's work stems from a careful and meticulous observation of reality, from an analytical and anxious gaze that focuses on trivial, everyday and fragmented experiences.
Her approach captures the imprint of a presence which, although never fully revealed, manifests itself in the passage, the transit and the traces left by humans.
In a suspended atmosphere, her subjects explore inhabited spaces, inviting the viewer to resonate with universal and profound themes.
At the heart of her research is the concept of limen , the threshold — as a place of tension, transformation, and potential
Anne-Juliette Deschamps
Anne-Juliette Deschamps draws inspiration from cosmology through the journey of light and the creation of matter, as well as from cosmogony, that is, the way in which populations understand natural phenomena related to their environment, leading them to imagine the formation of the universe.
The emergence and primary nature of origins are confronted with a minimalism devoid of artifice, inviting a return to the source.
A vocabulary of geometric and symbolic forms — cyclic circles, solar disks, maternal spheres, or even parallelepipeds built by man — exists alongside the organic forms of living things, which reassert their rights under the influence of the cosmo