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The Wynne Prize is Australia’s most prestigious award for landscape painting, awarded annually by the trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW for ‘the best landscape painting of Australian scenery, or figure sculpture’.
This is an open competition, making for a brilliantly diverse lineup each year. Finalists are displayed in a hugely popular triple-bill exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW each year, alongside the Archibald and Sulman Prize exhibitions.
This year, over a third of the Wynne finalists are Indigenous artists, including trailblazing artist Nyapanyapa Yunupingu, from North-East Arnhem Land, who our Indigenous Art columnists, Jessica Booth and Laetitia Prunetti of Willie Weston, profiled a couple of months ago. In her distinct style, Nyapanyapa’s work is softly rendered in pale natural pigments on bark, whilst other indigenous painters, such as Wawiriya Burton, adopt an entirely different approach, weaving dreamtime narratives with powerfully vivid colour that leaps off the canvas.
Elsewhere in the lineup, the Australian landscape is celebrated directly and figuratively, with a number of entries depicting complex, beautiful scenes of dense vegetation. We especially love John Murray’s intensely detailed watercolour work, ‘Bellinger River, Thora’ (at just 11 x 21cm!) and Lucy Culliton‘s ‘Love lies bleeding‘, both of which are mind-bogglingly detailed in their depiction of lush, vibrant foliage and flora.
The Wynne prize exhibition is on show at The Art Gallery of NSW until October 22nd – you can view the full lineup of shortlisted works here.
