Sydney-based emerging artist Natasha Walsh has won the 2018 Mosman Art Prize Major Prize, Australia’s oldest and most recognised local government art award, for her self-portrait The cicada (2018).
Walsh is best known for her small-scale self portraits, having previously won the Mosman Youth Art Prize and featuring as a regular finalist in the Archibald. This win will be the 24-year-old artist’s most prestigious achievement, receiving $50,000 and her work entering the celebrated Mosman Art Collection.
Painted with oils on copper, Walsh’s winning work is an anthropomorphic personification of herself as a cicada. Making reference to German-speaking writer Franz Kafka’s famous absurdist short story The Metamorphosis, Walsh reconfigures the anguish of the Kafkaesque into a more gentle, yet equally striking expression of acute vulnerability, stating ‘the cicada, an insect long associated with immortality and re-birth, represents here a state of being.’
This influence of German culture filters through the painting. Cressida Campbell, 2018 judge, artist and former Prize winner, stated that the work ‘excites me in a similar way to that of the German painters Hans Memling and Lucas Cranach the Elder,’ and noted a ‘shadow’ of German-born painter Lucien Freud in its technique.
‘The acutely observed and delicately painted pale figure emerging from the copper in her ethereal clothing is both startlingly contemporary and yet wistfully mysterious at the same time. To paint a figure is always ambitious and Natasha Walsh’s The cicada manages to be beautiful yet unsentimental, as well as original,’ continues Campbell.
The use of copper as a canvas lends the work an angelic, dream-like quality – seemingly soaked in sunlight, the cicada emerges from the comfort and confinement of her ‘shell’, represented metaphorically as her dress and veil. The materiality of the painting allows a further layer of meaning to form outside the work, as Walsh says ‘a painting itself is a shell, which artists leave behind.’
Director of Mosman Art Gallery, John Cheeseman, said ‘Walsh is on track to become one of the greats in Australian Art.’
The other awards announced as part of the 2018 Mosman Art Prize are as follows:
Margaret Olley Commendation Award ($5,000) given to Zoe Young (Bowral) for her work Winter Soundtrack // 99 Luftbaloons (2018).
Allan Gamble Award (for built environment) valued at $3,000 won by Khaled Sabsabi (Sydney) for his work Guerilla (2018).
Guy Warren Emerging Artists’ Award ($2,000) presented to Becky Gibson (Canberra), for her work Timber (2017).
These winning works, along with those of all the 2018 Mosman Art Prize finalists, will be on display at Mosman Art Gallery until Sunday 18 November 2018.
