The Edwina Corlette Gallery has announced Zoe Young as the winner of the $30,000 Portia Geach Memorial Award with her portrait of film director Bruce Beresford, titled Drawing Storyboards 2018. The Portia Geach Memorial Award is one of Australia’s most prestigious art prizes for portraiture by a female artist. The judging panel included Samantha Meers who is an Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) trustee, Natalie Wilson who is the curator of Australian and Pacific art at AGNSW and the Director of SH Ervin Gallery, Jane Watters.
Fascinated by the simple beauty of the every day, Zoe Young works between still life, portraiture and abstraction to capture her delight in life’s fleeting moments, turning them into something intimate, revelatory and long-lasting. Originally trained in sculpture, her boldly feminine works are underpinned by a solid foundation of modernist theory and considered technical approaches to colour, composition and mark making.
Zoe Young trained at the National Art School in Sydney under Ron Robertson-Swann, an apprentice of Henry Moore. A two-time finalist in both the Archibald Prize and the Calleen Art Prize, she has also been named among the finalists of the Portia Geach Memorial Art Prize in 2017, the Mosman Art Prize , Salon des Refusés, S. H. Ervin Gallery, Cooks Gallery Emerging Art Prize in Newcastle and the Wingcarribee Art Prize in Southern Highlands. In previous years, Zoe was also highly commended in the Meroogal Women’s Art Prize, as well as became Yen Magazine’s annual Female Artist of the Year in 2014. In 2013 she won the Snowy Mountains Art Prize and was highly commended in the John Briscoe Memorial Art Award at Raglan Gallery in Cooma. Zoe’s solo exhibition at Edwina Corlette Gallery opens next month from 22 November to 14 December 2018.
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