Looking AHEAD

This year's National Emerging Art Prize winners conjure the shape of things to come.

- HARRY ROBERTS

A MIXED-MEDIA REIMAGINING of a classic Dutch vanitas. An ancestral story retold across three bark panels. A black-and-white beach scene recalling the great modernist photographers who lensed Australia at leisure and defined the nation’s sunny self-image. There were echoes of the past at this year’s National Emerging Art Prize (NEAP), where three rising talents — Alexander Bebbington, Datjuluma Guyula and Penelope Green — were named recipients of the program’s major accolades. But each artist’s work presents its own boldly original vision, true to NEAP’s forward-looking ambition to spotlight and support the country’s next wave of creative talent while giving collectors entrée to an exciting new guard.

NEAP’s fifth edition was celebrated in November with a buzzy prize-giving party at The Garden Gallery in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden, where paintings and photographs by more than 60 finalists were presented in the program’s annual exhibition. Sydney-based artist was named the Overall Winner of the Morgans Financial Prize for Emerging Painters for Little Pied Cormorant, in which the titular bird is meticulously hand-painted in oils over a printed photograph of a still-life tableau styled after a museum diorama.