Grace Cossington Smith art award 2016 Finalists

2016 art award

The Grace Cossington Smith art award is sponsored by Abbotsleigh and commemorates one of its alumni, Grace Cossington Smith, who is known as a pioneer of modernist painting in Australia.

Artists were invited to submit original two dimensional artworks reflecting the theme of Making Connections. The winning entry will form part of the permanent collection of Abbotsleigh’s Grace Cossington Smith Gallery.

The selector/judges for the 2016 Grace Cossington Smith art award are:

Rhonda Davis senior curator of Macquarie University Art Gallery and

Dr. Andrew Frost researcher in science fiction, cinema and contemporary art, art critic for Guardian Australia and a lecturer in the Dept. Media, Music, Communications and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University.

The $15,000 Grace Cossington Smith art award winner and finalists will each be awarded $1,000. Finalists’ artworks will be displayed at the Grace Cossington Smith Gallery at Abbotsleigh, Wahroonga from 5 November to 10 December 2016.

2016 art award Winner

The winner of the Grace Cossington Smith biennial art award for 2016 is Mark Titmarsh

Light from Light, Part 1-3, 2016
Acrylic and automotive polish on aluminium
110 x 90 cm each

Artist Statement
The mystery of light and colour is all around us at all times. It is to be found equally in nature, and in our fluorescent post-industrial environment. Science tries to explain light and creates a muddle of waves and particles. Believers take light to be the essence of the god head, a primordial state of grace that has no forbears, unbegotten, where the only thing that can create a god or light is god as light. For unbelievers, the essence of light is the wonder of the world, the source of all interest in things, the mood of the moment, the play of appearance and depth across an infinity of possibility. In this painting, colour is the tension and connection between various modes of light, between the geometric and biomorphic, the painterly and industrial, the flatness of the image and the fatness of an object, and so on.

2016 GCS art award Finalists exhibition

 
Photography copyright Richard Glover