Overview
Winner
Finalists
Jurors
International Judge
Jurors' statement
Publication
People's Choice Award
The $50,000 Walters Prize is awarded for an outstanding work of
contemporary New Zealand art produced and exhibited during the past
two years. Previous winners were Yvonne Todd for Asthma and
Eczema (2002), et al. for restricted access (2004),
Francis Upritchard for Doomed, Doomed, All Doomed (2006),
Peter Robinson for ACK (2008) and Dan Arps for
Explaining Things (2010).
Named in honour of the late New Zealand artist Gordon Walters,
the Prize was established in 2002 by Founding Benefactors and
Principal Donors Erika and Robin Congreve and Dame Jenny Gibbs,
working together with Auckland Art Gallery. The Prize, held every
two years, aims to make contemporary art a more widely recognised
and debated feature of cultural life.
4 August - 11 November 2012
Level 2 exhibition spaces
Free entry
WINNER OF THE WALTERS PRIZE
2012
Kate Newby is the winner of the Walters Prize 2012 for her work
Crawl out your window. She wins $50,000 and an all
expenses paid trip to New York with the opportunity to exhibit her
work at Saatchi & Saatchi's world headquarters.
International judge, Chief Curator at the Mori Art Museum (MAM)
in Tokyo, Japan, Mami Kataoka says, 'I would like to award the 2012
Walters Prize to Kate Newby. It has been very difficult to create
an order among the four artists' practices, which are all
outstanding in different ways. While Newby's work is probably the
least eloquent by making minimal interventions into the given
space, it embraces memories of locations, her personal gestures and
subtle actions, which viewers can relate to through small objects
embedded into the concrete ramp and the materiality of the
suspended fabric.
'More importantly, the use of natural light and the way the work
gradually crawls out of the museum space is the most reserved but
radical way of transcending the fixed architectural space for
contemporary art, liberating us towards wider universal space. The
colour yellow emphasizes the cognition for the light and the space
and the whole installation offers the physical experience and
awareness of both void and silence. This decision is derived from
my attempt to evoke a state of equilibrium in our ever competitive
and hierarchical society and its abiding belief in power.'
FINALISTS FOR THE
WALTERS PRIZE 2012
Simon Denny: Introductory logic video
tutorial, shown at Artspace, Sydney (5 March-10 April
2010)
Alicia Frankovich: Floor Resistance,
shown at Hebbel Am Ufer, HAU 3, Berlin, (25 June 2011)
Kate Newby: Crawl out your window, shown
at Gesellschaft für aktuelle Kunst GAK,
Bremen (28 August-7 November 2010)
Sriwhana Spong: Fanta Silver and Song,
shown at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (4 February-5 March
2011)
Read more about the artists here.
JURORS
David Cross - artist, writer, curator and
associate professor in Fine Arts at Massey
University, Wellington
Aaron Kriesler - curator at Dunedin Public Art
Gallery, Dunedin
Kate Montgomery - senior arts advisor for Visual
Art at Creative New Zealand
Gwynneth Porter - writer, editor and
publisher
INTERNATIONAL JUDGE
The international judge for the Walters Prize 2012 is Mami
Kataoka, Chief Curator at the Mori Art Museum (MAM) in Tokyo,
Japan. Kataoka's curatorial practice extends to projects the world
over, including 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012) in South
Korea, Phantoms of Asia: Contemporary Awakens the Past
(2012) at Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, and Ai Weiwei:
According to What? (2012) at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden in Washington DC.
Kataoka will select the winner, announced at a gala dinner in
October. The winner will receive $50,000 and an all expenses paid
trip to New York, including the opportunity to exhibit at Saatchi
& Saatchi's world headquarters. The Walters Prize 2010
international judge was highly respected former-director of
London's Tate Modern, Vicente Todoli.
JURORS'
STATEMENT
In a two-year period marked by a multitude of compelling
exhibitions and projects the jury has settled on four bodies of
work which were each seen to occupy unique and adventurous
territory in New Zealand art. Nominations were arrived at on the
basis of showing strong evidence of a particular kind of searching
engagement within the artists' own practice and with the conditions
of the larger world beyond.
While a variety of methodological approaches are visible in the
selection, this was not the intention of the jury at the outset.
Rather, it was a by-product of the vitality and imaginativeness of
the field in general. What does inform all of the selections is an
engagement with how the discrete sculptural object is pushed beyond
itself into film, installation, work in public space and
performance.
The jury is firmly of the belief that each artist has in
startling ways interrogated and pushed their practice with great
rigour and dexterity to offer new meditations on the possibilities
of material, form and its assorted social contexts. Ultimately,
each project demonstrated a palpable influence on the art making
and viewing communities from which it has arisen.
PUBLICATION
A companion publication to the exhibition is available in the Gallery shop.
Title: The Walters Prize 2012
Author: Natasha Coneland
Publisher: Auckland Art Gallery
Date of publication: 2012
ISBN: 978-0-86463-289-0
RRP: $14.00
PEOPLE'S CHOICE AWARD
Congratulations to Sriwhana Spong who was named the winner of
the people's choice award for her artwork Fanta Silver and
Song.
Thanks to our preferred accommodation
providers
