R&M McGivern Prize - previous winners

2016

Rose Nolan
Big Words - QUOTE / UNQUOTE (double version)
2016
acrylic paint on cardboard
Photography Matthew Stanton

Inspired by the provocative aesthetics of Russian Constructivism and associated with the Store 5 group of artists from Melbourne, Rose Nolan is a highly regarded mid-career artist who has exhibited extensively in Australia and overseas since the 1980s.

The work, an acrylic painting on concertina cardboard, blurs the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture. Through competing red and white forms, language shifts from something

2012

Rosslynd Piggott, Night - 24 hours/Tremor

Piggott’s style is slow and deliberate, often using natural forms and systems as a starting point for painterly meditations. The winning painting depicts the same area of sky as recorded over a 24 hour period. The artist describes how the work forms “a tenuous time line across a falling and chaotic night sky. This painting aims not to illustrate these ideas, but to emanate them, in stillness and vibration.”

2009

Celeste Chandler, Untitled 5, series naked in the dark, 2009, oil on linen, 132 x 152.5cm.

This work combines Chandler’s mastery of the brush with her interest in manipulating paint into human skin and the intangible connections and disconnections that exist between people.

2006

 
Stephen Haley, United (but not reconciled), 2006, acrylic on canvas, 153 x 182 cm

Haley’s work addresses itself to the issue of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Through incorporating a single-point perspective view and an aerial view of suburban Australia, the work alludes to the vantage points of two different cultures and to the tensions that persist on the road to reconciliation.

2003

Martin King, First Rain 11, 2003, pigment and wax encaustic on canvas, 153 x 153 cm

In 2003 the inaugural R & M McGivern Prize was awarded to Martin King for his painting First Rain II, 2003. Inspired by his travels to remote Indigenous communities in the far north of Australia, the work depicts the coming of the rains to the harsh desert terrains of the continent’s interior.