We are thrilled to announce that Nicole Kelly has been selected as a finalist in the prestigious Wynne Prize 2026 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales for her beautiful work Bird Hour.
This marks Nicole Kelly’s second time as a finalist in this coveted prize, following a stellar few years for Kelly which included being announced as the winner of the prestigious Evelyn Chapman Art Award, her sixth time as finalist in the Portia Geach Memorial Award, and her selection as a finalist in The Alice Prize. One of the youngest recipients of the Brett Whiteley Scholarship, Kelly’s evocative and enigmatic landscape 'Bird Hour' was selected for this years prize. Depicting Fowlers Gap, the painting vibrates with colour, with deep magentas, greens and teals lingering on the essence of the subject and the poetics of memory.
I have visited the arid zone of remote Fowlers Gap Research station in NSW, 110km North West of Broken Hill continuously for the past 6 years. ‘Bird Hour’ is an accumulated response to these visits that celebrates the variety of bird life and visually shifting desert landscape. Reflecting on our binding relationships with the landscape and a love of the land, the painting reveals an ongoing attempt to portray reality in a way that liaises not with literal representation but feeling, memory and thought, dispersing familiar representations of the landscape within a field of colour, mark and line. — Artist Statement, Nicole Kelly 2026
The Wynne Prize opens at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on 9 May and continues until 16 August 2026.
