The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) has announced Sydney-based artist Jude Rae as the winner of this year’s $80,000 BVLGARI ART AWARD for her painting “SL 359 2016.”Awarded annually to support mid-career Australian painters, the award consists of $50,000 for the Gallery’s acquisition of a painting and a residency for the artist in Italy valued at $30,000.Jude Rae’s practice encompasses still life, portraiture, and interior scenes, but she is best known for her highly refined explorations of the still life genre.Over the last 30 years, Rae has exhibited her work in Australia, New Zealand, Germany, and the USA, and has won numerous awards for her work.According to the AGNSW, Rae’s award-winning “SL 359” elevates skillfully rendered gas cylinders and fire extinguishers to “a mesmerising state of potential threat,” with the contrast of the illusion of the painted objects and the materiality of the painting itself adding another layer of tension.Art Gallery of New South Wales Director Michael Brand said, “Jude’s paintings have accurately been described as slow-burning.”“They take a venerable and familiar form such as the still life, and draw the viewer into a deeper contemplation of the nature of perception, consciousness and being, through canvases of quiet, meditative beauty.”“Rae has embraced the grand tradition and history of still life painting and merged it with abstraction and formal concerns - her deceptively straightforward composition for SL 359 is an exploration of mass, matter and surface,” added Head Curator of Australian Art, Wayne Tunnicliffe.
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