"Art is not sport. No one can properly win at art" — Miranda Sawyer, Why I love the Turner Prize
Who wins an art prize depends as much on who is making the decision, their cultural
context and references, and their taste, as it does on the artist and their work. The judge
of the 2018 Adam Portraiture Award is Angus Trumble, Director of the National Portrait
Gallery of Australia. The Award was founded in 2000, supported by the Adam Foundation
from 2002, and is hosted biennially by the New Zealand Portrait Gallery. It has always had
an invited international judge – an attempt to bring a degree of impartiality and external
objectivity to what is inherently a subjective choice.
From a list of 278 digital images, Trumble selected a shortlist of 50 artworks for the
exhibition at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery and toured to galleries across the country.
Final judging happens in situ—mere days before the first opening—where the scale,
materiality and contextual information surrounding the artwork can be considered in
the flesh. Whatever the limitations of this system (and all systems have their limits) it is
a process that allows artists working all over the country and at different stages of their
career to be considered for New Zealand’s premier portraiture prize of $20,000. The
previous winners are: Andre Brönnimann, Henry Christian Slane, Stephen Martyn Welch,
Harriet Bright, Irene Ferguson, Freeman White, Ryuzo Nishida and Marianne Muggeridge.
While history will ultimately have the final say on merit, the Adam Portraiture Award
highlights the power of portraiture, raises the profile and engagement with the genre
of portraiture, and celebrates New Zealanders and the painters who represent them.
It demonstrates that depictions of people continue to have the power to captivate us,
irrespective of the flexing and fluxing of styles in contemporary image making. We love to
look at images of people, be that people we love, people we judge, people we remember,
people we admire, and even people we know nothing about, yet.
Published by the New Zealand Portrait Gallery
Te Pūkenga Whakaata on the occasion of The Adam
Portraiture Award 2018, 28 February – 27 May 2018.
ISBN: 978-0-473-42882-2
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