Gibraltar Students Prize

Magda has a strong connection to Gibraltar as her mother was Gibraltarian and Magda studied in Gibraltar until the frontier was closed in 1969. A gallerist and curator, Magda holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the Sevilla University. In 1982, she opened Magda Bellotti Art Gallery in Algeciras. Over many years of hard work promoting emerging talent in the region, Madga moved the gallery to Madrid in 2001.

Since its opening, the gallery participated in numerous art fairs, including Arco (Madrid), Art Frankfurt, Artissima (Torino), Maco (Mexico) and Balelatina (Basel). When the gallery closed in 2018, Magda moved to live in Algeciras, where she remains involved in numerous projects as a curator and is deeply interested in promoting young talents artists living in Gibraltar and the Campo de Gibraltar area she discovered when she returned to Algeciras.

Magda also sees the potential of this whole area with the impressive Strait of Gibraltar with Africa just on the other side. An enormous energy that we must take advantage of with ambitious cultural initiatives. In some of these initiatives she is working currently.

Henry Little is the Director of Fortress House and holds responsibility for the conception and delivery of collection displays, exhibitions, commissions, and acquisitions.

He is a published specialist on contemporary art having worked closely with artists, galleries and collections for the past 15 years. As an advisor, he has built international collections for private museums, individuals and companies in America, Europe and Asia. After studying art history at the University of Cambridge and the Courtauld Institute of Art, Henry worked at the Contemporary Art Society, an organisation which acquires on behalf of UK museums. He subsequently co-founded a gallery based in London, Breese Little, organising more than 50 exhibitions.

As an author, Henry has written frequently for Phaidon publications including Vitamin P3, Flying too Close to the Sun, Vitamin T, Great Women Artists and Prime: Art’s Next Generation. His first book, Commercial Galleries: Bricks, Clicks and the Digital Future, was published by Lund Humphries in September 2023.

Monica Popham is an artist from Gibraltar, who is currently based in Guildford. She studied Fine Art at Loughborough University and graduated in 2021. Monica’s main body of work focuses on the tangible quality of sunlight, and how it interacts with the architecture in Gibraltar and other Mediterranean towns.

She captures the synergy between sunlight and buildings through photography and paint and plays with the vibrancy and scale of the pieces, varying from small, intimate tiles to larger paintings.

Monica recently won Landscape Artist of the Year 2024 and has completed a commission for the Science Museum on the renewable energy and innovation happening in Orkney.

Howard Bilton is Chairman and founder of The Sovereign Group. Howard holds a joint honours BA degree in classics and law from the University of Keele and is qualified as a Barrister and called to the Bars of England/Wales and Gibraltar.  

He is a visiting non-resident professor at Texas A and M University where he assists with their LLM and Masters degrees in International Tax and Offshore Centres.  

In 2003 he formed The Sovereign Art Foundation (SAF) which runs a range of art prizes designed to increase the exposure of artists in the region, while raising money to help disadvantaged children.  

SAF has raised over US$11 million which has been used to help thousands of disadvantaged children using expressive arts as a means of education and rehabilitation.  

Howard has a personal art collection comprising around 420 pieces made by a wide range of artists from students to internationally famous artists.   

He has acted as a judge on various Sovereign sponsored art prizes in Hong Kong, Bahrain, Gibraltar, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, London, Malta, Mauritius, Portugal and Singapore.  He has also acted as a nominator for the Sovereign professional prizes in Africa and Portugal. 

Howard is the Founder and Chairman of Howard’s Folly Wines, Portugal. All wines use art on the labels and often feature work by finalists of the various Sovereign art prizes or children taught by SAF. A proportion of the revenue from wine sales goes to support SAF.