WINNER of 2021 KAAF ART PRIZE
$20,000
(acquisitive prize)
CATHERINE O'DONNELL
(represented by Dominik Mersch Gallery)
Still Lives
Charcoal on Paper 47 x 110 $8500
My art practice is anchored in the suburbs, depicting the urban aesthetic which shapes and informs our everyday lives; it searches for the humanity, history, and politics of a place by reframing the familiar. Presenting untethered architectural details, my drawings strip back the supposed uniformity of suburbia, unveiling the individuality within its often dismissed or overlooked dwellings.
Using minimalism, I isolate these modest buildings from their contexts and represent only their structure to explore their compositional potential and underlying symmetry, striving to offer a renewed vision of these landscapes, often seen as bleak. I aim to inscribe the lives lived within these dwellings, to insinuate the qualities of home, to reassert value.
Click to View Judges' Commentary on Catherine O'Donnell's Still Lives
HIGHLY COMMENDED
$2,000
(non-acquisitive prize)
SONIA MARTIGNON
We Need the Tonic of Wildness
Acrylic and Pyrography on Hand-cut Plywood
81 x 121 $2700 (3D Wall Art)
Standing at the point where human development has halted and the wilderness stretches ahead untamed allows a glimpse into the past, to a time when nature flourished. Living in the verdant Top End and armed with the belief that all living things are connected by the habitats we share, my work aims to capture this precious wildness, documenting its wealth of colour, shape, spirit, and mood. It pays homage to the fertile environments that are under constant threat. Climate drawdown is the most comprehensive scientific plan we have developed to reverse the destruction of our natural world. Sequestering carbon in the soil, drawing it down through our precious plants, will mean we can reverse centuries of human folly. Protecting and regenerating our disappearing forests and bushland is key.
Click to View Judges' Commentary on Sonia Martignon - We Need the Tonic of Wildness
HIGHLY COMMENDED
$2,000
(non-acquisitive prize)
CHRISTINE DRUITT-PRESTON
(represented by Artsite Galleries / photograph by Document Photography)
The Chinese Screen
Lino Block Print on Wenzhou Paper
103 x 78 $1900
Informed by a drawing of the Tweed Regional Gallery Margaret Olley home studio re-creation, ‘The Chinese screen’ 2021 is a two-block lino print that reinterprets a motif used by Olley in many of her paintings. Here the screen, placed in the small yellow room that was her original studio in her Duxford Street, Paddington home, is underpinned by the ghosts of patterns borrowed from my living room studio, as though floating on a lace curtain.
This work acknowledges the lineage of women artists whose artworks respond to the domestic interiors that also served as their studios.
Click to View Judges' Commentary on Christine Druitt-Preston - The Chinese Screen
JUDGES' COMMENDATION
TRISTAN CHANT
Lobster with Fruit Bowl
Pigment on Paper (Digital Print) 66 x 150 $5000
In nature, a decomposer is an organism that decomposes, or breaks down organic matter to recycle back into the ecosystem, providing nutrients for regrowth and regeneration.
Lobster with Fruit Bowl (part of the Decomposer series), explores ways of replicating the decomposition process in the art ecosystem. Digital images of still life paintings which have representations of organic matter are passed through algorithms in music and photo editing software. In this way, the reproductions of the paintings represent the organic matter while the algorithms act as the decomposer. The resulting works are randomly stretched and decayed across the picture plane.
JUDGES' COMMENDATION
JAEDON SHIN
At The Temple
Acrylic 146 x 146 $8000
My painting, ‘At The Temple’ is a sort of pandemic fable. This image might have come to my mind in a supernatural situation of Covid19 that has never been experienced before. It is ironic to recall such a collective society after a long time of isolation caused by a harsh lockdown.
The society that divides the world into dichotomies of good and evil is religious. People gather and pray at temples in deep mountains. Their numbers are so high that the temple is cramped. For them, those outside the temple are evil and they are the only good. The night is already getting deeper. There are two moons floating like ghosts above the mountain, shining faintly. Enemies are all gone and only they exist in the world. Now they are fighting each other. But there's no distance between them, so everyone looks like a lump.
2021 KAAF Art Prize Finalists Exhibition
Friday, 5th November 2021 ~ Friday, 10th December 2021
NOW SHOWING at the KOREAN CULTURAL CENTRE GALLERY
255 Elizabeth St,
Sydney NSW 2000
02 8267 3400
Gallery Hours: Mon-Fri 10 - 6
Sat (13th November & 4th December only) 10 - 4
Semi-Finalists' digital exhibition also showing online.
