Ben OsborneLeo Fitzmaurice has this year been announced the winner of the Northern Art Prize at the final presentation at Leeds Art Gallery tonight.
Leo Fitzmaurice took the prize awarded by the judges, after being nominated by Kate Farrell, Curator (Special Exhibitions), at The Lowry, in Salford. According to our arts writer Jo Brown, “The everyday and the familiar seen afresh is also intrinsic to Leo Fitzmaurice’s work.
“He has designed and built a small shed-like structure in which you sit to watch a loop of images from the urban environment captured on his mobile phone over seven years – just things that “stop you in your tracks”, many of them witty (I thought) and with a thought-provoking sub-text. For the other half of his exhibit, he raided the gallery’s store rooms for ‘academic’ landscape paintings, perhaps the sort of art I might tend to pass by rather swiftly, and has hung them, regardless of their ornate frames, to form a sort of continuous horizon. It makes you look. And think.”
Richard Rigg has won the online poll voted for by the public, “Rigg’s minimal works have a delightful, witty simplicity that pitches reason against itself to undermine our rational and habitual understanding of objects and their meanings.”
The Northern Art prize is a testament to the quality of art in the North and One&Other congratulate Leo and all the other shortlisted artists.
