Georgetti’s work wins Geelong contemporary art prize

MELBOURNE-based artist Diena Georgetti has been awarded the 2021 Geelong contemporary art prize for her painting AMPERSAND.

The selection panel included art historians and curators, Jenepher Duncan and Grazia Gunn and Geelong Gallery director and chief executive officer Jason Smith, who were drawn to AMPERSAND for its conceptual poise and eloquent formal composition.

The judges said the painting, produced in 2020, extended Diena Georgetti’s idiosyncratic approach to picture-making as she assembled and juxtaposed abstract images and references to art historical precedents, along with modernist aesthetics, including design and fashion.

These reference points are drawn from books, archives and the internet, and function as Georgetti’s eclectic image-bank, but her sources remain elusive.

It is a creative process of sampling that reworks real and archival fragments in the spirit of historical collage while exploring the literal and metaphorical ways in which images are framed for the viewer.

AMPERSAND is an enigmatic and compelling work, melding formal painterly references to both analytical and synthetic Cubism, with a fugitive figuration that recalls the Classical nude pose and the enfolding pathos of Henry Moore’s sculpture and drawing.

The central configuration of this painting reflects the inward twist and turn of its title AMPERSAND, that archaic sign for notating the endless possibilities of the word “and” to a thought or narrative.

Above all, the judges agreed a relevant contemporary humanism pervades AMPERSAND, opening up this precisely constructed but poetic image to many readings and interpretations.

The judges also acknowledged the contemporary relevance and excellent quality of the works of the 28 finalists who were selected from an Australia-wide field of more than 600 entries.