On Thursday 5 March at Juniper Hall Paddington, the 2020 winners of the Tom Bass Prize for Figurative Sculpture were announced by Sydney artist, Lea Ferris.
Categories include the $15,000 Tom Bass Prize, the $4,000 Highly Commended Prize, the $2,000 Youth Prize and $1,000 Crawford’s Casting People’s Choice Prize (which will be announced at the close of the exhibition). The prize was judged by three prominent and diversified artists: Ingrid Morley, Alex Seton and Jennifer Turpin.

Shane Nicholas, Scanned Figure with Arms Outstretched, polylactide and pigmented polyurethane, 230 x 180 x 130cm
The Tom Bass Prize ($15,000) was awarded to Victorian artist Shane Nicholas with his sculpture, Scanned Figure with Arms Outstretched. Nicholas uses systems of art-making to explore the mechanisms inherent in smart technologies to investigate how human subjects could be viewed by systems of online surveillance and subsequently represented. The winning sculpture was produced from a 3D scan of the artists’ body. Every distortion in form was directly caused by errors that occurred in the scanning process.
The Highly Commended Prize ($4,000) was awarded to New South Wales artist Miroslav Kratky with his sculpture, Big Ear. And, the Curator’s Choice Prize went to New South Wales artist Louis Pratt with his sculpture, Regret and Legacy.
Curated by Wendy Black, the 2020 Tom Bass Prize for Figurative Sculpture Exhibition is a showcase of representational, abstract, innovative and contemporary works inspired by the human form. The show can be viewed from 6 to 22 March 2020 at Juniper Hall, 250 Oxford Street, Paddington NSW.
Part of Art Month Sydney, the Tom Bass Prize is hosting two special events: a Life Drawing workshop on Saturday 21 March from 2-4pm, and an Artist Talk on the Sunday 22 March at 2pm.