It just so happens that the current edition is a clean sweep for Flanders. This year, seven finalists (five from Flanders, two from Brussels) were selected from a field of 200 candidates to create new works for the final judging. Those pieces, which the artists were given nine months to produce, are currently on view at Bozar, where the award ceremony was held late last month.

Overall, the disparate works - photographs, videos, drawings and sculpture (but not a single painting) - are quiet and contemplative, even when mechanically intricate and technologically complex. Els Vermang's interactive, shape- and colour-shifting wall of independently rotating squares and frames clatter softly as they change position. The work, created in collaboration with the art collective LAb[au], bespeaks a level of achievement that makes it no surprise to learn that each of these "young" artists has a career well underway.

It's interesting to test one's own impressions of their works against those of the judges. Antwerp artist Lara Mennes won first prize for her black-and-white photographs of a former coal mining village in Limburg. The images are paired with short texts contrasting master planner Adrien Blomme's noble intentions with the experiences of the town's hard-labouring residents.

History and memory are also at the core of laureates Nico Dockx and Helena Sidiropoulos' project. Documented on video, it entails assembling an archive and getting a reading of the very building in which the exhibition is staged, Victor Horta's Art Deco masterpiece. One memorable close-up sequence shows cobwebs being collected from a stone surface somewhere in the complex. The technique used is the same as for rolling snowballs: the mass - in this instance a historical one - gets bigger as goes.

I might have handed first prize to laureate Leon Vranken for his beguiling sculpture installation - a room of pure enchantment created with an array of basic geometric volumes (most in wood) and a few utilitarian objects (ditto) stacked and otherwise deployed with whimsy ingenuity. A beautifully turned bowling pin-shaped object atop a tall plinth and a watermelon-sized sphere of red-brick, with mortar seams echoing the lines of baseball stitching, are just two of the elements which pair Surrealism and Minimalism to elegant, energising effect.

www.bozar.be

Young Belgian Painters Award
Bozar, Ravensteinstraat 23
Brussels
Until 13 September