Sculptor Patricia Cain has been awarded this years 25,000 Threadneedle Prize and artist duo Boyd & Evans have won the inaugural pound;10,000 Visitors’ Choice award.
Selectors Xavier Bray, Assistant Curator at the National Gallery, David Rayson,
Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art and Michael Sandle RA, Fellow of
the Royal British Society of Sculptors chose Cain’s work Building the Riverside
Museum from a shortlist of seven to win the £25,000 Threadneedle Prize, with
each of the runners-up receiving £1,000.
£25,000 prize-winner Patricia Cain trained as a lawyer before becoming a fulltime
artist in 2004, going on to complete her PhD at Glasgow School of Art. She
lives and works in Glasgow, and her work is focused largely on regeneration of
the city. Building the Riverside Museum explores the physical construction of the
Glasgow Riverside Museum of Transport, designed by architect Zaha Hadid. Cain
uses pastel, often considered a difficult medium, to create large-scale industrial
drawings, where broad and confident lines of colour build a structure into the
work that replicates its subject matter. Earlier this year, Cain won the Aspect Prize
2009/10.
The £10,000 Visitors’ Choice was awarded to Boyd & Evans, as their landscape
Clee Hill 2009 received the highest number of votes from the public visiting the
exhibition, a different choice to the selectors. The public vote is of central
importance to the ethos of The Threadneedle Prize, as Lewis McNaught, Director
of the Mall Galleries, says, ‘People come to art very engaged, they have opinions
and they have the right to express those opinions’.
Recipients of the Visitors’ Choice award, husband and wife artists Fionnuala Boyd
and Les Evans, work in Milton Keynes, where they have been living since 1980,
when they took up a residency in the new city. Clee Hill 2009, depicting a barren
landscape in Shropshire after heavy rain, was also selected by both Jeremy
Paxman and Matthew Collings for the Critics’ View event earlier in the exhibition,
where four celebrated critics were invited to choose their favourite work of art on
display, and deliver a short speech about it to an audience of gallery visitors.
Working together since 1968, the pair have artwork in several public collections,
including Tate and MoMA.
A total of 46 works are displayed in the Threadneedle Prize exhibition at the Mall
Galleries, chosen from 2,185 works submitted through open submission. The
exhibition closes on 18 September 2010.