Image: Gail Hastings, colour circle: four colour scheme for a room (2018), lead pencil and acrylic polymer on wood, 120 x 240 x 3 cm. Image courtesy the artist and the National Art School. Photo: Robin Hearfeld

The 2018 Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize was today awarded to Melbourne-based artist Gail Hastings and Sydney-based emerging artist Adrian McDonald. Celebrating its 22nd year, the Prize is among Australia’s best-known art awards, spanning all mediums and offering a total of $36,000 in prize money. Hastings was awarded the established artist category ($25,000) for colour circle: four colour scheme for a room (2018) and McDonald was awarded the emerging artist category ($10,000) for Approximating a Circle (2018). The Viewer’s Choice Award of $1,000 is to be announced in May at the end of the exhibition.

Gail Hastings has been working and exhibiting since 1989. Her rigorous and deeply-committed practice is informed by a complex spatial investigation from the 1960s that the artist and others believe has been miscalled ‘minimalism’. Her works, which she describes as ‘sculptural situations’, or ‘sculptuations’, call our attention to a real space made active through its co-extension with an aesthetic space of objects and form, with colour and text that engage the viewers’ imagination. Her ‘sculptuations’ are like ‘passages’ of thought that meander through rooms with walls, where we find ‘ourselves’ physically wandering, while wondering. The viewer’s ‘engagement’ becomes an unfolding plot that turns back on itself: her work is poetic, witty and always visually accomplished.

Adrian McDonald was awarded the emerging artist prize for his compelling and pared-back painting, Approximating a Circle (2018).  McDonald is a Sydney-based artist who has been exhibiting since 2003, a painter whose work may be characterised as a mode of philosophical reflection, inspired by the formal language of music. Appearing as a series of fine, raised lines on a raw linen surface, McDonald’s painting explores unseen spaces and speaks of the pauses, silences and purity of harmony, conveyed in the gaps between the lines on the canvas. The artist sees his painting as an ongoing exploration of complex relationships between beauty, truth and freedom as they relate to the historical origins of both abstract and concrete art.