Threadneedle Prize: Shortlist Announced For Leading Figurative And Representational Art Competition

Threadneedle Prize 2016

The Columbia Threadneedle Prize, one of Europe’s leading open competition for figurative and representational art, has announced the six artists and their works that have been shortlisted for the 2016 Prize.  The winner will be announced: Tuesday 2 February 2016

Selected from 3,828 entries submitted by 1,973 artists from 29 European countries, the six finalists in line for the £20,000 Prize will all exhibit at Mall Galleries, London in February before their work along with a selection from the exhibition travels to the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence in an unprecedented exchange. The winner will also receive a solo exhibition for a wider body of work at Mall Galleries in 2016.

The shortlisted artists are Peter Clossick (67), Lewis Hazelwood-Horner (23), Nicholas Holmes (71), J. Carlos Naranjo (32), Laura Smith (34) and Chris Thomas (68).

The shortlist were selected by the following distinguished panel:

 Emma Crichton-Miller, columnist for Apollo magazine, freelance journalist for Financial Times, FT  How to Spend It, The Wall Street Journal Europe and the RA Magazine David Dawson, artist, writer and photographer, Dr Arturo Galansino, Director General at Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Tim Knox, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Lewis McNaught (Selection Panel Chair), Director of Mall Galleries.

Selection panellist Tim Knox said, ‘‘I was really impressed with the range, the invention and the commitment of the artists to produce really quite ambitious works. We have seen works of art of every shape, size and medium: some striking and some thought provoking. The Prize attests to the strength, vibrancy and liveliness of representational art today.”

Lewis McNaught, Chair of the Selection Panel and Director of Mall Galleries said, “To win the Columbia Threadneedle Prize is life changing for an artist, it offers the chance to be seen by critics, dealers, collectors and the media. It puts an artist’s work on a platform where it can be admired across the whole of Continental Europe.”

The 2016 Columbia Threadneedle Prize winner will be announced at a Gala Awards Dinner at the Mall Galleries in London on 2 February 2016. Visitors to the London exhibition will also decide the Visitors’ Choice Award, worth £10,000. 

The 2016 shortlisted artists/works are: 

Peter Clossick

Summer Solstice. Oil on canvas

Peter Clossick, 67, is an artist, painter, living in London who is interested in people, their lives and his connection to them through the painting process. Summer Solstice is a view from his studio which looks onto his back garden and a swing built for his three year old grandson. Clossick trained at Leicester College, Camberwell College of Art and Goldsmiths’ College and is a leading member of the New English Art Club. 

 Lewis Hazelwood-Horner

Salt in Tea, 2015. Oil on canvas

Lewis Hazelwood-Horner, 23, grew up and lives in Enfield. He attended the Byam Shaw School of Art (2010-11) and The London Atelier for Representation Art (2012-14.)   Salt in Tea comes about from a two year artist residency project at the bespoke umbrella and walking stick manufacturer James Smith & Sons, London. This painting shows the craftsmen at work in their workshop. The title refers to when the craftsmen jokingly put salt in one another’s tea.

Nicholas Holmes

Winton Field, 2015. Acrylic on paper

Winston Field is part of a larger series of collages comprised of fictional characters Seeing is Believing, which melds together aesthetics from both the nineteenth and twentieth century. It is inspired by the writing of authors such as V.S. Naipaul, William Faulkner, and George Orwell. Holmes trained at the Winchester School of Art and earned a Masters in Art from Sunderland University in 2003. Holmes is 71 years old and lives in Herefordshire.

J. Carlos Naranjo

El Mameluco (After the Battle), 2015. Oil on canvas

J. Carlos Naranjo, 32, lives and works in London after moving from Spain in 2014. He studied at the University of Fine Arts in Seville, earning both a Bachelors and Masters in Fine Arts. His shortlisted work, El Mameluco (After the Battle), is inspired by Goya’s, El dos de mayo de 1808 en Madrid although in contrast to Goya’s brutal scene, Naranjo depicts a calm starlit night.

Laura Smith

Shells, 2015. Oil on canvas

Laura Smith, 34, is based in London, where she studied at Slade School of Fine Art for her Bachelors in 2003 and her Masters in 2012. Her work Shells positions itself near the edge of still life painting, approaching abstraction. She is interested in dissolving our familiarity with everyday objects. Shells is a recent painting where the field of vision has expanded to include several objects, populating an ambiguous space. Smith was shortlisted for the Columbia Threadneedle Prize in 2011.

Chris Thomas

Sheep with their lambs, 2014. Oil on canvas

Chris Thomas, 68, lives and works in Cornwall, which inspired his work. Sheep with their lambs depicts the farmland surrounding his home in a remote part of North Cornwall. The painting captures a transient moment when a group of sheep are with their lambs before they are taken for slaughter. Thomas studied Fine Art at Reading University from 1965 -1969.

London exhibition opens: Wednesday 3 February – Saturday 20 February 2016 Mall Galleries, The Mall (near Trafalgar Square) London SW1

 

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