McClelland announces the winner of Rick Amor Drawing Award 2024.

McClelland is delighted to announce the winner of Rick Amor Drawing Award 2024.

The Rick Amor Drawing Award 2024 goes to Ian Hay for his drawing ‘… and somewhere else tomorrow’ as the most outstanding original drawing and which will become part of the McClelland Collection.

This second iteration of this prestigious biennial and acquisitive award, with $20,000 prize money, attracted over 150 applications. Artists Rick Amor and Paul Boston and McClelland’s Executive and Creative Director Lisa Byrne selected 22 works to shortlist as finalists.

The 2024 Rick Amor Drawing Award finalists are: Kylie Blackley, Moira Burke, Carmel Byrne, Philip Cooper, Matthew Clarke, W.H.Chong, Yvonne East, Linda Fardoe, Vivien Gaston, Harry Hay, Ian Hay, Barbie Kjar, James Money, Susan Morse, Adam Nudelman, Catherine O’Donnell, Massimo Palombo, Ignacio Rojas, Claire Sheperd, Mary Tonkin, Caroline Walls, Michelle Zuccolo.

The Award judge, renowned Australian artist Nick Mourtzakis, said the work, ‘…and somewhere else tomorrow’ by Ian Hay is a drawing that compresses and measures its forms in quanta of square millimetres with a beautiful precision. The work is fraught with speculative and possible resolutions and seems to develop in an entirely improvised way toward an inevitable conclusion; it’s a fascinating work.

“While representing diverse and varied approaches, the singular qualities that mark the drawings in the exhibition, are the motivation and humane conviction to evoke significant meanings and confirm the life of the emotions.

“Drawing has its beginnings in prehistory and is in effect a powerful and natural antidote to the more delusional aspects of contemporary technology and culture,” Nick Mourtzakis said.

McClelland Artistic and Executive Director, Lisa Byrne, said the exhibition represents an excellent opportunity to review the best of what’s happening right now in the field of drawing in contemporary art practice across Australia.

“The finalists’ works demonstrate a strong diversity of approaches to drawing, from fluid, to controlled drawing practice, to disciplined and some freer suggestive ways of drawing, across a range of still life, abstract and conceptual.

“Drawing has been traditionally used as a preparatory activity in sketching and studies ahead of finished paintings or sculptures. This Award demonstrates the vibrancy of drawing practice as exciting media in its own right, full of invention and experimentation," Ms Byrne said.

In conceiving the Award, Artist Rick Amor said he wants to promote the practice of drawing in contemporary Australian art, noting that “this prize gives people one more reason to keep drawing on paper… the most direct and intimate expression of an artist’s sensibility”.

Rick Amor was born in Frankston and has drawn and painted the area many times over the course of his artistic career. He reaffirms his commitment to drawing by saying, “A room full of drawings is a wonderful thing to behold”.

The winning work and the shortlisted finalists’ works are exhibited at McClelland until 21 July.

___

Nicholas Mourtzakis
Judge announcement, 21 April 2024

We are rightfully reminded that we live on an ancient land that is and has been for many many thousands of years the homeland, the mother, of the proud indigenous peoples of this country.

In drawing, which is as ancient a creative practice as we can claim to know, the visual and psychological plane of the work can open onto a wider and deeper field of knowledge and understanding of self, culture and history.

Even before there was a word for drawing there was drawing. In a world as ancient as one can imagine, human beings physically and symbolically traced the contours of their meaningful relation and engagement with the environment and nature.

For Joseph Beuys, a quintessentially contemporary European artist, the external world of physical phenomena is permeated by the presence of elemental thought and the interiority of consciousness and a drawing “is already in the thought, and therefore it is the thought”; “a special form of materialized thought”.

Beuys had experienced the immediate trauma of the Second World War and through the most alarming and vulnerable experiences arrived at a profound necessity and ethical purpose in creativity.

“The things which always cause difficulties – war, destruction of nature, the debasing of nature, and the alienation of humankind’s creativity – have to be overcome through a very complex gestalt, where the drawing plays an important role as a starting point”.

While presenting diverse and varied approaches to drawing the works in this exhibition, taken as a whole, share a singular humane conviction and poetic motivation; that is to evoke significant meanings and confirm the life of the emotions.

The work that I have chosen to be the recipient of the Rick Amor Drawing Prize for 2024 is a drawing that compresses and measures its forms in quanta of square millimetres with a beautiful precision. The work is fraught with speculative and possible resolutions and seems to develop in an entirely improvised way toward an inevitable conclusion. It is a fascinating work.

‘.... and somewhere else tomorrow’ by Ian Hay.