Congratulations to Andrew Browne who has been awarded the $30,000 Geelong contemporary art prize for 2018.
The biennial award for contemporary painting is acquisitive, so Browne’s winning work, The awakening, 2017, will join the permanent collection of the Geelong Gallery.
The 2018 prize was judged by head curator of international art at the AGNSW Justin Paton, director of the Shepparton Art Museum Rebecca Coates, and senior curator at the Geelong Gallery Lisa Sullivan. They selected the Melbourne-based painter from a field of 36 finalists.
“This was a work that drew us in immediately and kept drawing us back,” said the judges in a joint statement on Browne’s work. “Gothic and film-noir-esque, the painting’s moodiness and ambiguity are absolutely of our times. This may be an image of the fate of painting, or a broader evocation of a world where troubling events transpire on the edge of our awareness.”
Although he is primarily known for painting, Browne also works with photography and printmaking techniques and in 2016 he won the Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing.
Works by all 36 finalists in the Geelong contemporary art prize are on show until 19 August.
Andrew Browne’s solo exhibition Spill is currently on view at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne until 7 July.
Geelong contemporary art prize
Geelong Gallery
9 June – 19 August
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