emerging artists

Art & Australia / Credit Suisse Private Banking Contemporary Art Award

An open competition that supports emerging professional artists through the publication of their work on the back cover of Art & Australia. Additionally, one recipient's work will be acquired annually for the Art & Australia collection.

Artist entries are administered by the National Association for the Visual Arts Ltd (NAVA). For further information, visit the NAVA website.

The winners of the award are selected by Art & Australia in consultation with its Advisory Board members.

Read about the history of the award here.

Credit Suisse is a global financial services business that combines expertise in many fields and locations.

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Del Kathryn Barton was the inaugural artist selected for the ANZ Private Bank Emerging Artists Program; her work appeared on the back cover of the Spring 2004 issue (vol. 42, no. 1). Del Kathryn Barton currently lives and works in Sydney where she is represented by Roslyn Oxley Gallery.
 
Melbourne artist Nick Mangan was the second artist to be selected for the program. Mangan's sculptural work appeared on the back cover of the Summer 2004 issue (vol. 42, no. 2). Mangan is represented by Sutton Gallery, Melbourne.
 
Astra Howard was the third beneficiary of the award. Howard is a Sydney artist, currently completing PhD studies at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. You can read about Astra Howard's work in the Autumn 2005 issue of Art & Australia (vol. 42, no. 3).
 
The fourth beneficiary of the program was Amanda Marburg. This Melbourne artist's distinctive paintings are the end-product of an extended process involving photography and model-making. You can read about Amanda Marburg's work in the Winter 2005 issue of Art & Australia (vol. 42, no. 4).
 
Our fifth artist was Selina Ou, a photographer based in Sydney, who has spent time living and working in China and Japan. You can read more about Ou's engagement with concepts of consumerism, identity and everyday life in the Spring 2005 issue of Art & Australia (vol. 43, no. 1).
 
Jonathan Jones is the sixth beneficiary of the ANZ Private Bank Emerging Artists Program. Jones is an installation artist based in Sydney, represented by Barry Keldoulis Gallery, Sydney. You can read about his light installations in the Summer 2005 issue of Art & Australia (vol. 43, no. 2).
 
Christian de Vietri was the seventh artist to be selected for the program. De Vietri is a Perth-based artist who works in sculpture, photography and digital media, and is represented by Goddard de Fiddes Gallery, Perth. You can read more about his remarkably quirky style in the Autumn 2006 issue of Art & Australia (vol. 43, no. 3).
 
Our 'number eight' was James Lynch. Lynch is a Melbourne-based video artist who produces intriguing, dreamlike animations. He is represented by Uplands Gallery, Melbourne, and Galerie Frank, Paris. You can read more about his work in the Winter 2006 issue of Art & Australia (vol. 43, no. 4).
 
The ninth artist to be selected in the program is Michelle Ussher. Based in Melbourne, Michelle works primarily in watercolour and gouache, and produces delicate, striking images about nature as it relates not only to the environment, but also to human behaviour. She is represented by Darren Knight Gallery in Sydney. You can read about her work in the Spring 2006 issue of Art & Australia (vol. 44, no. 1).
 
The tenth artist to be selected is Rob McHaffie, profiled in our Summer 2006 issue. A Melbourne-based painter, McHaffie's peculiar canvases are skilful depictions of static kitsch: where carefully selected yet seemingly random objects and figures are placed in intriguing juxtapositions. McHaffie is represented by Darren Knight Gallery in Sydney.

The first artist to be selected for the award in its new incarnation, as RIPE, the Art & Australia ANZ Private Bank Contemporary Art Award, is Louisa Dawson. Dawson creates large-scale public sculptures using everyday objects, skewing their functions in order to reawaken the viewer to the contradictions of contemporary society. Dawson's work is profiled in the Autumn 2007 issue (vol. 44, no. 3).
 
The second artist to be selected for the RIPE award is Giles Ryder. Ryder's work consists of reflective 'mirrorchromes', rolled aluminium, auto lacquer and large neon assemblages. You can read more about Ryder's work in our Winter 2007 issue of Art & Australia.
 
Art & Australia's Spring 2007 issue (vol. 45, no. 1) features the RIPE winner Mark Hilton. Hilton's vast and exquisitely detailed lightboxes belie the Melbourne artists's fascination with the darkest recesses of contemporary experience.
 
Helen Johnson is the RIPE Award Winner for Art & Australia's Summer 2007 issue. The Melbourne artist employs the medium of wall and paper painting.Johnson is represented by Sutton Gallery, Melbourne. 

Grant Stevens is the RIPE Award Winner for Art & Australia's Autumn 2008 issue. Since graduating from Brisbane's Queensland University of Technology in 2002, the predominantly video artist has referenced footage, sound and text from Hollywood's entertainment industries to circle his own territory: the personal rhythms and riffs of popular culture.
 
The RIPE Award Winner for Art & Australia's Winter 2008 issue is the Sydney-based artist Jamil Yamani. In 2007 he completed his Masters in Fine Art at COFA. Yamani explores the complexities of political and cultural identity through video and sculptural installations. His work looks at experiences of exile and migration, traversing zones of inclusion and exclusion.

Ash Keating is the RIPE Award Winner for Art & Australia's Spring 2008 issue. This Melbourne-based artist intercepts and manipulates discarded waste to highlight the ecological fallout of mass-production and global capitalism. His work conjures notions of sustainable living and environmental reclamation, with a practice that spans process-based projects, public art, performance, video and painting.

Sara Hughes, a graduate of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts graces the back cover of Art & Australia's Summer 2008 issue. Hughes's brightly-coloured abstract wall works call attention to the connective impulses underlying contemporary life. Her suggestive swirls and painted pixelations illustrate our competing urges to consume or be consumed, for instant gratification or more serious satiation. With patterns that seem to proliferate randomly as if from a computer program, her site-specific works ask us to search for the unifying mark of the human hand.

Kushana Bush is the winner of the RIPE Award for the Art & Australia Autumn 2009 issue. Bush is an emerging Dunedin-based artist, whose main medium of expression is gouache and pencil on paper. Her most recent series, ‘The Revival’ draws on voyeurism to question the ideologies of beauty and identity.

Noël Skrzypczak is the recipient of the ANZ and Art & Australia Contemporary Art Award for our Winter 2009 issue. Skrzypczak’s gestural skins engage with the tradition of painting, summoning the wild legacy of American abstract expressionism in landscapes that are meditative, poetic and delightfully visceral. Often starting with an image collected from a newspaper or ink drawing, landscapes soon become sculptural toxic oozes that both lure and repel. The artist has recently completed a residency at Gertrude Contemporary Art Studios, Melbourne and is represented by Neon Parc, Melbourne.

Jordana Maisie is the Contemporary Art Award recipient for the Spring 2009 issue. Maisie asks us to think about the imposed limitations of personal communication technologies with a body of work that spans photography, video, sound, and interactive installation. Deploying technology in a gallery setting, Maisie sparks conversations between our bodies and sculptural, sound or video elements. Sydney-based Maisie has collaborated on projects across the internet and has undertaken residencies in Berlin and Chuncheon, Korea.

The recipient of the award for our Summer 2009 issue is Slovenian-born, Auckland-based artist Gregor Kregar. Kregar's large polyhedronal structures, installed variously among nature or in a constructed gallery environment, both dissolve into and amplify their surroundings. His figurative work plays with reproduction, the effect of the multiple and the notions of artistic and personal identity. Kregar's varied body of work seeks to activate space in its play with appearance and disappearance. The artist is currently working on a large public project for Abu Dhabi and a solo show for Gow Langsford.

Peter Madden is the Contemporary Art Award recipient for Art & Australia's Autumn 2010 issue. Madden describes himself as a 'sculptographer’; a ‘post-conceptual photographer’, recontextualising images from found magazines to create beautifully complex work. He breathes life into flat, frozen images, developing a sense of both spatial and temporal depth. Madden is exhibiting in 2010 at Brisbane's Institute of Modern Art. He is represented by Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Queensland, and Michael Lett, Auckland.

Susan Jacobs is the featured Contemporary Art Award winner for Winter 2010. Jacobs often ignites the friction between matter and space, conflating illusion and reality in the process. Often working site-specifically, Jacobs sees her work as a series of exercises in problem-solving and resourcefulness that inevitably develop their own sense of logic. This has led her to work in a plethora of mediums incorporating architecture, sculpture, installation, works on paper, video and photography. Jacobs is represented by Sarah Scout Presents in Melbourne.

For our Spring 2010 issue, we introduce Chantal Fraser as the recipient of the Contemporary Art Award. Through the act of adornment Fraser investigates the relationship between performance, cultural tradition and self-identity. A Samoan–Australian woman, Fraser offers a contemporary remix of the 'dusky maiden' or 'Polynesian belle' as she poses with shells and beads, creates paper-towel headdresses to recontextualise ritual and questions the authenticity of cultural exchange.

In the Summer 2010 issue the Contemporary Art Award highlights collaborative duo Pat Foster and Jen Berean. The pair have long been interested in contemporary structures and systems of control, looking to the raw materiality of human progress for inspiration. Their their sculptures and installations teter on the edge of utopian ideals and practical limitations, ultimately questioning the social and political implications of unfettered urban developent. Foster and Berean are represented by Murray White Room in Melbourne.

Emma White is the Contemporary Art Award recipient for March 2011. White engages in a cyclical game of material production, spending hours meticulously recreating common objects such as stationary, used coffee cups or the detritus of an absent painter out of polymer clay – on occasion White further removes us from her object's everyday reality by presenting only photographs or video of these ciphers. White is represented by BREENSPACE, Sydney.

Sarah Ryan is the Contemporary Art Award recipient for June 2011. Time and movement is a prominent factor in Sarah Ryan's work. Her photographic imagery possesses an in-betweenness drawing attention to transitory moments and the problematics of the role of time in viewing art. Sarah Ryan is represented by Gitte Weise Gallery, Sydney.

Peter Nelson is the Contemporary Art Award recipient for September 2011. His work encompasses drawing and sculptural installation, drawing from diverse influences such as fourteenth century Chinese literati painting and real-time computer strategy games. He is represented by Flinders Street Gallery, Sydney.

Laith McGregor is the Contemporary Art Award recipient for December 2011. His multifaceted practice encompasses biro drawings, video, colourful sculptural busts and oil paintings which fits into a broad topography of new wave mystical and allegorical art. Laith McGregor is represented by Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art , Sydney.

Rebecca Baumann is the Contemporary Art Award recipient for March 2012. Rebecca Baumann's works examine the notional idea of creating a continuous colour experience with confetti, streamers and heady coloured clouds of smoke, billowing and moving to create an almost hypnotic effect.

Tom Polo is the recipient of the Contemporary Art Award for June 2012 . Typified by a self-conscious reflection on art production and its value, Tom Polos practice is based in painting with extensions into installation and performance. His ongoing series of text paintings Continuous One-Liners, begun in 2008, reworks phrases from overheard conversations and the self-help industry, such as Its your time, 2011, and More better, 2009, while other phrases like Advice for a failed painter (Maybe try video art), 2008, express the limitations of the artist in a comical way.

Alistair McLuckie is the Contemporary Art Award recipient for Spring 2012. McLuckie's work draws from non-western histories of folk, tribal and outsider art to create narratives depicting mythological creation stories that are known for their meticulous design and obsessive execution. Alistair McLuckie is represented by Murray White Room, Melbourne.

Britt Salt is the Contemporary Art Award recipient for Summer 2012. Salt's practice utilises and subverts the inherent 'heavy-duty' quality of commercial products such as powder-coated aluminium and industrial mesh to create sculptural and light based interplays of patterned forms. Britt Salt is represented by Helen Gory Galerie, Melbourne.

Patrick Francis is the Contemporary Art Award recipient for Autumn 2013. Francis is a young Melbourne-based artist whose studio is based in the Arts Project Australia studios. His gestural paintings, such as Not titled (Napoleon), 2012, featured on the back cover of Art & Australia's Autumn issue, feature his signature blocks of colour.