Louise Hearman wins 2014 Moran prize, Australia’s richest portrait award
Louise Hearman’s painting of photographer Bill Henson has won the Doug Moran National Portrait prize for 2014.
Now in its 26th year, the Moran prize is Australia’s richest portrait award offering 0,000 to the winner, double the prize money of the Archibald prize.
In 2014, the Moran prize attracted 985 entries to the Archibald’s 884 entries. Unlike its more high profile counterpart at the Art Gallery of NSW, the Moran does not require its subjects to have fame or notoriety. “We’re happy for an artist to paint anybody,” Peter Moran has said.
“I think people are more able to relate to what I describe as normal people.”
Both Hearman and her subject are represented by the same Melbourne gallery, Tolarno Galleries. Her winning diptych casts Henson in a contemplative light using the same chiaroscuro effect that his works are famous for, albeit in photography rather than painting.
Edmund Capon and Lewis Miller, co judges of the prize said: “Louise’s diptych of Bill Henson was the one work we kept going back to and looking at. It is very intimate, very personal, compelling and obsessive – a little bit like both the artist and the subject.”
In 2008, the photographer’s work prompted a national debate on censorship after photographs were seized by police from an exhibition of his work in Sydney. The case became the subject of a book, The Henson Case, by the journalist David Marr, now at Guardian Australia, and has been referenced in the recent case of Melbourne artist Paul Yore, who was accused of producing and possessing child pornography in a 2014 art installation at the Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts before all charges against him were dismissed in October.
The Moran prize announcement was made at Juniper Hall in Paddington, Sydney, where an exhibition of all finalists – including past Archibald winners Marcus Wills and John Beard – is running until 15 February.
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