The winners at the ING Discerning Eye Exhibition have been announced. Seventeen artists received over £12,500 in prizes, with Max Hembrow being awarded the ING Purchase Prize for his vibrant oil painting, The Author.
The ING Discerning Eye, an open exhibition and nationwide art competition that drew over 6,000 entries from artists across the UK has unveiled its 2024 winners.
Sponsored by Dutch bank ING, the exhibition is curated by six tastemakers: critics Will Gompertz and Paul Carey-Kent, artists Adebanji Alade and Nina Murdoch, and collectors Carol Leonard and Gabrielle Blackman.
After an intense two-day process, the six selectors narrowed down the thousands of submissions to 685 artworks to be featured in a diverse exhibition of emerging and established artists.
On the exhibition’s opening night, Max Hembrow was awarded the ING Purchase Prize, worth £5,000, for The Author, a vibrant, cubist-inspired oil painting. In total, £12,500 worth of prizes were presented to 17 artists nationwide.
The exhibition now runs at the Mall Galleries in London from Friday, 15 to Sunday, November 14, with the online exhibition continuing until January 1 2025.
The ING Purchase Prize, worth £5,000, went to Max Hembrow for The Author, a vibrant oil painting on canvas.
Hailing from Oxford, Hembrow’s masterful use of colour and exciting composition brings an energy to this captivating painting. His work combines an appreciation of early Modernism with a love of music, characterised by the same undulating lines and abstracted forms, but with a vigorous colour palette.
The Discerning Eye Founder’s Prize, honouring the charity’s founder, Michael Reynolds, worth £2,500, went to Felicity Gill for Fluorescent Pink, selected by Gabrielle Blackman.
Felicity Gill’s portrait captures a unique tenderness in her sitter. It combines a blurred, contemplative figure with an undulating fluorescent line of pink paint, leading the viewer’s eyes to loop around the work’s surface. A figurative and portrait artist based in Kent, Gill’s painterly work has received critical acclaim due to her exceptional artistic talent and arresting visual style.
Judith Symons claimed the Mervyn Metcalf Purchase Prize, worth £500, for Chair Study, a beautifully detailed ceramic sculpture depicting a cafe scene across its surface. Symons has brought her wealth of printmaking and painterly experience to the world of ceramics, a discipline she rediscovered later in life.
The work’s surface has been etched to produce bold, rough lines, which, combined with a light painterly hand, provide a wonderful sense of depth and texture to the work. Produced in the round, one can circumnavigate the work to view different elements of the scene.
Sarah Hall, the charity’s chair, awarded Paul Newlan the Discerning Eye Chair’s Purchase Prize, worth £1,000, for his painting Incoming Mist, Winter. This evocative work captures the last glimmer of sunlight on a cold winter evening as suburban houses are gradually enveloped in the deep blue hues of dusk.
Drawing predominantly from memory, Newland is “fascinated by the way we see, for instance, a place – the ways in which our perceptions are overlaid or conditioned by memory, imagination, history and emotion.”
The Discerning Eye Drawing Bursary Prize , worth £1,500 , was awarded to Gerry Davies , for his three entries imagining life after a deluge of biblical proportions: Flood Story: The World Over, Flood Story: John Soanes’ Museum and Flood Story: Insect Deluge. Chosen by Discerning Eye’s advisory Artists’ Educational Panel each year, this bursary allows the recipient further to develop their drawing practice.
Made with powdered graphite on Mylar, these drawings represent scenes of our speculative future. Three flooded images eerily greet the viewer, offering no obvious signs of life but for divers navigating the gloomy depths of these intricately desolate landscapes. Although representing climate catastrophe, these works offer a glimpse of hope in spite of their overtly apocalyptic subjects.
Tabish Khan’s Critic Prize, worth £200, went to Yvan Rolly Nembot for Lydol, a hyperrealistic pencil drawing on paper. The artist has mastered the use of their pencil, rendering the sitter’s skin incomprehensibly smooth whilst her turban dances with intricate patterns. The subject’s outreached ringed hand seems to escape the page, rendered with accuracy and care.
“Art collecting should be for everyone,” says Tabish Khan, known as the London Art Critic. “I wanted to give a prize to a work under £200 so aspiring collectors can see there’s an affordable entry point for anyone who wants to start buying art.”
“Start buying art. That first work could be the foundation for building a collection. The range of prices in this exhibition – starting at £75 – means there is something for everyone here.”
The exhibition will be free to see at the Mall Galleries in London from Friday, November 15, to Sunday, November 24, 2024. A virtual exhibition of shortlisted works will open alongside it and close on Sunday, December 31, 2024. A programme of events and artist demonstrations will be held every day of the exhibition at the Mall Galleries from 2 pm to 4 pm.
Opening times: from 10am to 5pm daily from Friday 15 to Saturday, November 23. 10 am to 1 pm on Sunday, November 24 2024.
For more information, please visit https://www.discerningeye.org/.
Lead image: Will Gompertz at the Opening Night of Discerning Eye 2024. Photo courtesy of ING.