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Melbourne artist Peter Wegner has won the $12,000 Rick Amor Drawing Prize for his triptych, Three Days with E.M, a documentation on the humanity of ageing and friendship.
The winning work was drawn after E.M entered palliative care. “A way of saying goodbye and at the same time reflecting on the fagility of life”, says Wegner.
This year’s judge was Melbourne-based artist and teacher artist Nick Mourtzakis. He said that many drawings in the exhibition were compelling, “particularly because of the significant relationship that the subject held for the artist and the meanings that are therefore embodied in the works”.
“The immediate experience of a work is always disarming, regardless of the work’s pedigree or degree of accomplishment. When looking at drawing, where the identity of the maker is present in a particularly distinct form, the intensity of the encounter can be alarming. As in all such encounters, one can walk away and hopefully try to forget”.
“This drawing by Peter Wegner, in a most poignant way, brings us into a vulnerable proximity with the suffering other”.
Gallery Director Gordon Morrison comments on Wegner’s win and his use of medium and technique.
“The medium of drawing embraces a wide range of different approaches both in terms of subject matter and in terms of mode of execution.
“This Prize embraces landscape and figurative drawing; narrative imagery and abstracts. Some works are highly finished while others show the artist in the spontaneous act of creation, where the hand is rendering what the eye is seeing at a given moment.
“Wegner seems to inhabit both these spaces. His pencil renderings of a very ill man, which the artist describes as a sequential act of ‘saying goodbye’, are exquisitely drawn but also extraordinarily moving and intense.”
The Rick Amor Drawing Prize was instituted by artist Rick Amor to promote the practice of drawing among Australia’s professional artists, aspiring that “this prize gives people one more reason to keep drawing on paper… the most direct and intimate expression of an artist’s sensibility.”
Art Gallery of Ballarat
Until 2 October, 2016
Victoria
Peter Wegner with winning work
Peter Wegner, Three Days with EM, pencil and beeswax on paper, 74 x 32cm
