Meet: William Ludwig Lutgens

As artists, William Ludwig Lutgens is a versatile man. He makes sculptures, paintings and booklets, but also increasingly works with sounds in his installations. Still, first and foremost he is a draughtsman, in his own words: "My ideas actually always start from a drawing, and the right form follows naturally. Art is my way of processing the overload of information we currently receive. This can be news broadcasts, but also randomly overheard conversations." Eventually, a fictional version of these story fragments ends up on paper, wood or canvas. The themes that often come up are not the lightest, for instance, he regularly touches on oppression, freedom or lust.

In his painting with distinctive illustrative style, William uses various techniques, switching freely between watercolours, oils and acrylics. He is praised for his sense of humour and self-mockery, which go perfectly well with his socially critical tone. The Flemish artist is regularly told that his style is 'truly Belgian' - probably because of his figurative signature that is in keeping with the country's art history. Although he now lives in Antwerp, he grew up in Belgian Limburg. After his studies, he moved out of Limburg, and for a while he feared they had forgotten him there. But over time, William and Limburg began to find each other again. He exhibited regularly in Hasselt and Genk, and had several residencies there.

At SCHUNCK, he shares the showcase with Mickey Yang. That's still room enough for his grand spectacle, William says. "There will be an installation I exhibited earlier this year - How to fall in love with art and the art of not wasting food - but with a Dutch twist. In the earlier version of this, I showed a row of puppets dressed in bureaucratic fashion, i.e. with a shirt, tie and neat trousers. They represented the office workers, lined up in a form of protest. They occupied the space, their territory. At SCHUNCK, there will be a new variant, winking at 'The Potato Eaters' by Van Gogh, with a table setting reminiscent of the Last Supper. With this, I want to question the current class system: the necessary evil of rules and systems."

Should William walk away with the prize, he will invest the prize money in a subsequent major solo exhibition, as well as several months in New York, to build his network there.