The Bulgari Art Award consists of a $50,000 painting acquisition for the Art Gallery of NSW and a residency in Italy valued at $30,000. The total award of $80,000 is one of the most valuable art awards in Australia. The 2013 Bulgari Art Award was presented to Jon Cattapan on Saturday, April 13 at an official gala dinner at the Gallery.
Jon Cattapan is a highly regarded artist and one of Australia’s finest contemporary painters. Cattapan’s subject is often contemporary cities, both their architecture and organisation and how we inhabit them. He overlays specific imagery with an abstract patterning that recalls the digital matrixes through which information circulates, extending local references into more global concerns.
Cattapan’s winning painting Imagine a Raft (Hard Rubbish 4+5), 2012, is a triptych painted over a five-year period. Images of a city and abstract digital grids are juxtaposed with an image based on humble discards, a pile of disused furniture waiting for the council collection trucks at the end of Cattapan’s street in Melbourne’s St Kilda. The discarded objects resembled a marooned vessel and started Cattapan thinking about broader issues of what we value and what we discard. How do simple belongings shape our sense of identity? And how, by extension, can global preoccupations with territories and surveillance inform the creative zeitgeist of our times? These questions are a part of the artist’s thinking and aesthetic.
Image
Jon Cattapan, Imagine a Raft (Hard Rubbish 4 + 5), 2012, oil on linen, 140 x 140 cm each panel
