Elizabeth Price, Jess Flood-Paddock, Des Hughes and Lucy McKenzie are the four artists shortlisted for the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award for Museums.
This annual award invites UK-based museums and public galleries from the Contemporary Art Society’s Museums Membership network to apply for the £60,000 award to commission an artist of their choice to make a new work for their public collection.
Artist Brian Griffiths, The Guardian’s Chief Arts Writer Charlotte Higgins, Zabludowicz Collection Director Elizabeth Neilson and Whitechapel Gallery Curator Kirsty Ogg have whittled down the initial submissions to just four museum-artist partnerships. Noting the high calibre that the UK’s national arts institutions lever, Neilson said: “It was a challenge to select four proposals when every one of the applications should be seen through to completion. I expect the next stage of selection to be even harder.”
The next stage will see fully developed proposals from the four artists and their nominating institutions.
Elizabeth Price’s proposal with the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Achaeology in partnership with the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art would allow her to make a new digital film exploring taxonomic systems based on archive material from these fascinating anthropological collections.
Studio-based sculptor Jess Flood-Paddock’s humorous and surreal objects of giant dimensions is also inspired by her potential commissioner, Birmingham Museums, and the possibility to use their Collections Centre, with it’s 500,000 objects dating from Palaeolithic times as her expanded studio.
One might assume that artist Des Hughes would be attracted to a similarly ancient collection; yet interestingly it is one of Henry Moore’s bronzes that has sparked his alternative take on the modernist master should the Hepworth Wakefield win the award.
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art have proposed with Lucy McKenzie, a painter known for her on-going interest in and use of traditional techniques.
“The winning artist gains the opportunity to develop their work and ideas alongside a team of curators and museum professionals, which is often a new experience for them.” says Sophia Bardsley, Deputy Director of the Contemporary Art Society.
With the award now running for its fifth year, she articulates the wider value of such a partnership as “a lifeline to the winning museum to acquire an important new work that will put their contemporary collection more firmly on the contemporary art map.”
The London award ceremony to announce the winners will take place on 18 November 2013. For more information visit contemporaryartsociety.org
