We are thrilled to announce that Nicole Kelly has won the prestigious Evelyn Chapman Art Award. Presented to an Australian painter under 45 every two years, the coveted award provides a $50,000 scholarship to further their education in knowledge and art practice overseas or in Australia.
For Kelly, this award will support her in conducting research at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark where the Nordic tradition of painting; its dark realism, symbolism and psychological space that exists within the Nordic landscape is of particular interest to her. The work of Mamma Andersson will be her prime focus with Kelly drawn to Andersson's 'expressive and emotionally loaded landscapes that describe a melancholy world where beauty and confusion go hand in hand'.
Kelly creates paintings that linger between the essence of a subject and the experience of being. Clouded by the romanticism of remembering, her paintings are imbued with experience captured in vibrant strokes of colour and with swift brushwork. Kelly’s works, informed by an interest in literature and the discipline of painting, cast moments of shared stillness in an atmosphere of light. She says of her works “my desire is to push painting beyond a surface likeness of any subject and into the realm of poetics”.
Winner of the prestigious Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship (2009) and the Hurford Hardwood Portrait Prize (2018), Kelly is well recognised for her landscape, portraiture and still life painting. She has undertaken residencies in France (2019, 2018, 2017, 2010) and Spain (2016) and has completed major public commissions for the Sutherland and St George Hospitals in Sydney. She is also the co-owner of 'In The Field' an artist workshop held at Fowlers Gap and various overseas locations.
Her work has been selected for inclusion in the Lester Prize for Portraiture at the Art Gallery of WA (2019, 2018, 2017, 2015), Portia Geach Memorial Award (2021, 2020, 2019, 2015, 2014), Salon des Refusés (2023, 2020, 2019) and Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW (2015). Kelly’s work is held in the collections of the Moran Art Foundation and Lismore Regional Gallery, among others. She has also completed her Masters of Fine Art at the University of New South Wales researching contemporary painting and poetic literature.
