We Have a Winner: Tom Allsop | Ron Mandos Young Blood Award 2026

05.09.26

We’re happy and proud to announce the winner of the RM Young Blood Award: Tom Allsop! The award was presented this evening by Yvette van Caldenborgh of Museum Voorlinden, during the festive opening of Best of Graduates 2026.

Tom Allsop (2001), a 2026 graduate of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK), works with mechanical reproduction and obsolete image-making technologies. Using discarded engineering papers, diagrams, and antiquated drafting equipment, he recreates the appearance of mechanically reproduced images by hand. Each work is the result of a lengthy process in which images emerge through thousands of individual marks, like photographs slowly developing in darkroom solution.

In his winning series Numbering Pools, halftone patterns are perforated with leather punches into whiteprints from a John Cockerill factory near Liège, a remnant of Belgium’s industrial past now awaiting demolition. The images originate from the Keystone Stereoview Visual Survey Series, photographs once used for testing depth perception: diagrams reveal themselves up close, while the figurative images emerge from a distance. The small painting A Visual Survey, made on a fragment of a camera obscura, completes the presentation.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this special celebration. If you missed it, the exhibition is now open to the public and features the work of all 27 participating artists from Dutch art academies. Open through 30 August 2026. Read more about Tom Allsop here.