Offering a total prize pool of $36,000, the Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize seeks to encourage mentoring relationships between different generations of artists by requiring the curator-selected established artists to each nominate an emerging artist to present work alongside them in the exhibition.
The judges for this year’s Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize Justin Paton (Head Curator for International Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales) and Judith Blackall (NAS Gallery Curator) and Mark Harpley (Visual Arts Coordinator, Redlands School) announced the winning duo at the opening night of the exhibition of finalist works presented at the National Art School Gallery in Sydney.
Diena Georgetti, The Humanity of Construction Painting, 2017
Diena Georgetti was awarded the established artist category ($25,000) for The Humanity of Construction Painting (2017) and Kenny Pittock was awarded the emerging artist category ($10,000) for Fifty-two found shopping lists written by people who need milk (2016).
“In her acrylic on canvas work The Humanity of Construction Painting (2017), Georgetti has achieved a successful equilibrium through the considered resolution that belies its intrinsic compositional tensions. The work will be a valuable asset to the learning and teaching at Redlands as an object in its own right and in regards to the inherent complexities of abstraction in Georgetti’s material and conceptual practice,” says Mark Harpley, Head of Visual Arts at Redlands School.
Kenny Pittock, Fifty-two found shopping lists written by people who need milk, 2016
Emerging artist Kenny Pittock’s winning work is a humorous and strangely poignant investigation into the everyday: 52 shopping lists discarded in the milk section of a supermarket. The artist has faithfully reproduced every detail of each slip of paper. His use of white earthenware that materially appropriates paper, and his painstaking attention to detail is extraordinary. The range of languages in the various shopping lists, the often intimate items the shoppers listed, and the occasional personal notes, are touching and, in a way, poetic. Its down-to-earth materiality and emphasis on the hand and the eye makes an interesting juxtaposition to Georgetti’s refined abstraction.
“The interplay of the delicate earthenware permanently recording the ephemera of daily consumption and wasteful human nature combined with its intrinsic humour will ensure this work will resonate with and excite our students,” says Harpley.
NAS Gallery
28 March to 20 May, 2017
Sydney
