The Portia Geach Memorial Award is Australia’s most prestigious art prize for portraiture by women artists.
This year’s finalist exhibition displays fifty-eight works by leading Australian women artists representing the diversity in contemporary portraiture. First awarded in 1965, the $30,000 Portia Geach Memorial Award is presented to an Australian female artist for the best portrait painted from life of a man or woman distinguished in art, letters or the sciences.
Lynn Savery, Kindred Spirits, oil on linen, 210 × 180cm – Winner, 2022 Portia Geach Memorial Award
Art Almanac congratulates this year’s winner, Lynn Savery, for her work Kindred Spirits, a portrait of Eloise de Silva which demonstrates skills and expertise in painterly techniques and ambition. The judging panel: Anita Belgiorno-Nettis AM, Trustee of Art Gallery of New South Wales; Natalie Wilson, Curator of Australian and Pacific Art at The Art Gallery of New South Wales; and Director S.H. Ervin Gallery, Jane Watters, were reminded of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich whose allegorical landscapes also featured contemplative figures alone amongst darkened skies and leafless trees.
The 2022 Portia Geach Memorial Award finalist is on view at the S.H. Ervin Gallery, The Rocks, Sydney, from 16 September to 6 November 2022.
