Ukranian new media artist Sergiy Petlyuk has been announced the overall winner of GB£75,000 UK/RAINE: Emerging Artists from the UK and Ukraine, the first ever open competition and exhibition for emerging artists from the UK and Ukraine.Conceived by the Firtash Foundation in collaboration with London’s Saatchi Gallery, the aim of the competition is to identify and support talented artists between the ages of 18-35 who live and work in the UK or Ukraine, or were born in either country.The competition comprises five categories – installation, new media (including video and photography), painting, sculpture, and street art – with each of the category winners receiving GB£10,000 and the overall winner of the prize receiving a further GB£20,000.Petlyuk was awarded the GB£20,000 first prize in addition to the GB£10,000 New Media category prize for his “Untitled” video installation in which naked male and female bodies are projected onto outerwear to create what Petlyuk describes as “a unified moving mechanism.”The remaining GB£10,000 category prizes were awarded to: Roman Mikhaylov of Kiev for Installation, Dominic Beattie of London for Painting, Jamie Fitzpatrick of London for Sculpture, and Dima Mykytenko of Lutsk for Street Art. London artist Olivia Bax won the GB£5,000 Public Vote prize.Explaining his winning work, Petlyuk said: “Untitled is a nameless person, a naked body that lacks its face and, therefore, it’s most valuable and explicit visual identity. However, despite its impersonality, the mechanism of entitled bodies continues to live and function.”“The outerwear, the live human mass is projected to, was bought at the Second Hand; this outerwear was inherently deprived its former identity and now unified.“The project is about constant tension between personal, intimate, internal and social, communal, external. It is about social tendency for unification, consciously and unconsciously influencing personality. It is about the need of separation and disassociation from a conditional crowd.”An exhibition showcasing the work of the 30 shortlisted artists is on show across one entire floor of the Saatchi Gallery from November 24, 2015 until January 6, 2015. More info here
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