Winners Announced: The Art & Australia / Credit Suisse Private Banking Contemporary Art Award 2012

The National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) and Art & Australia are pleased to announce the 2012 recipients of the Art & Australia / Credit Suisse Private Banking Contemporary Art Award.

Alasdair McLuckie is a Melbourne-based artist whose practice encompasses drawing, craft and sculpture. McLuckie explores mythology and folklore with an aesthetic that references modernist design.

Britt Salt is concerned with creating spatial experiments where line, pattern, form and space intertwine. Her works often employ repetitive lines created from lengths of tape, or layers of industrial mesh suspended from the ceiling, to make unexpected forms for a viewer to encounter. Salt was born in Western Australia and is now based in Melbourne.

Tim Woodward is a Queensland based artist who works with a range of mediums and forms including film, audio recordings and installation. Often operating outside of the studio, Woodward is concerned with renegotiating an understanding of the art object and its place in the world.

Patrick Francis’s vivid portraits and still life installations in bright blocks of colour explore aspects of his personal experience. Francis is a Melbourne-based artist who has been working with Arts Project Australia since 2009.

Tamara Winikoff, Executive Director of NAVA said today, “Artists who win this award gain the imprimatur of very prestigious art publication. This provides invaluable exposure for their work and earmarks them as people whose careers are to be watched with interest. We are delighted to be able to contribute to the success of these promising young people.”

The Art & Australia / Credit Suisse Private Banking Contemporary Art Award has proved to be an important milestone in a young artist’s career. Awarded quarterly since 2004, the prize encourages artists in the first five years of their professional practice. With the support of Credit Suisse Private Banking, the prize helps emerging artists in two ways: by bringing their work to the attention of the public through the publication of their work on the back cover of Art & Australia, accompanied by a feature article; and by the annual purchase of a work from one of the four winners by Art & Australia to form part of its collection.

The Art & Australia collection will be exhibited at Newcastle Art Gallery in November 2012 and will tour to selected regional galleries during 2013- 2014.

For media comment: Tamara Winikoff, Executive Director NAVA ph: 0411 162 156 or (02) 9368 1900

Click here to download the Media Release. 

Image: Alasdair McLuckie, “The Highest Mountain Peaks, Right before Dawn”, 2009. Detail, Biro Pen on Plywood