Hannah Rickards has been announced as the winner of the 2018 Nigel Greenwood Art Prize, with Ima-Abasi Okon receiving the Nigel Greenwood Research Prize. The prizes are made in the memory of Nigel Greenwood, the late British gallerist who pioneered the careers of Gilbert & George, Keith Milow, David Tremlett and others. Rickards will undertake a three month residency at a cottage and studio in the Scottish Borders, and will receive an honorarium of £5,000, Okon will receive £1,000 and a one month residency.
Rickards and Okon was chosen by jury from a shortlist which also included Mark Barker, Alex McNamee and Freya Douglas-Morris. Each artist was nominated by a figure from the British art scene, the identity of which remained anonymous to the jury. The 2018 jury featured Stella Bottai, curator at Stanley Picker Gallery; Simon Groom, director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; artist Sam McEwan, Stephanie Straine, curator at Modern Art Oxford, and Oliver Basciano, the international editor of ArtReview.
The jurors noted that ‘the residency is set in such bucolic surroundings that it naturally lends itself to artists interested in the landscape. The history of the landscape has traditionally been a pictorial one however, so what excites us about inviting Hannah Rickards and Ima-Abasi Okon… is that both artists expressed an interest in aural or sonic space, as much as the visual.’
26 March 2018
