Peter Robinson has won the 2008 Walters Prize. The Auckland-based artist wins $50,000 and an all expenses paid trip to New York with the opportunity to exhibit his work at Saatchi & Saatchi's world headquarters.

International judge Catherine David says Robinson's work showed a sophisticated understanding of modernist principles, applied in a critical way to produce art that could be shown in Paris or New York and not lose its resonances. "Ack is multi-layered, engaging and universal. It is clearly the work of an artist at the peak of his career." Peter Robinson has won the 2008 Walters Prize. The Auckland-based artist wins $50,000 and an all expenses paid trip to New York with the opportunity to exhibit his work at Saatchi & Saatchi's world headquarters.

International judge Catherine David says Robinson's work showed a sophisticated understanding of modernist principles, applied in a critical way to produce art that could be shown in Paris or New York and not lose its resonances. "Ack is multi-layered, engaging and universal. It is clearly the work of an artist at the peak of his career."An independent jury of critics and curators selected the four finalists: Edith Amituanai, Lisa Reihana, John Reynolds and Peter Robinson. Each has received $5000 thanks to patron Dayle Mace.

Ashburton-born Peter Robinson's sculpture Ack occupied ARTSPACE at the same time as the 2006 Walters Prize exhibition where he was also a finalist for his work The Humours. Like The Humours, Ack implies notions about physical duration, about internal operating systems and the impermanence of organic material.

According to the jury "Peter Robinson's Ack confidently and assertively investigates and animates space, material and form - its exuberant presence engages the viewer in a confrontation verging on physical. Robinson's practice regularly critically examines the structures of cultural politics. Ack, however, adopts a more ambiguous position, offering forms that are at once playful, powerfully raw and seductive. The enigmatic title makes comic reference to the call of a duck and has a fictional German quality that conjures meanings relating to the land and to colloquial expressions. In 2006 Ack occupied Artspace at the same time Robinson's The Humours was shown in the last Walters Prize exhibition. Ack announced itself immediately as a work equally worthy of this award."

Auckland Art Gallery director Chris Saines says, "The Walters Prize set out to focus on contemporary work, but unconditionally celebrates the contemporary artist. Eight years and four prizes on, the artists who have participated in the prize are, without exception, continuing to push forward and to exert uncommon influence on contemporary New Zealand art. It has proven itself a reliable core sampler of some of our best and most enduring new work."

The biennial prize, named after pioneering modernist painter Gordon Walters, was established in 2002 with the support of founding benefactors Erika and Robin Congreve and Jenny Gibbs.

Previous winners were Yvonne Todd in 2002 for Asthma and Eczema, the et al. collective in 2004 for restricted access and Francis Upritchard in 2006 for Doomed, Doomed, All Doomed.

Robinson was presented the prize last night at a gala dinner at the Auckland Maritime Museum. The Walters Prize exhibition runs until November 23 at Auckland Art Gallery's New Gallery, corner of Lorne and Wellesley streets. Exhibition entry fees apply.

Artist Profile - Peter Robinson
Born 1966 Ashburton
Lives in Auckland
Graduated 1989 from Ilam School of Fine Arts, Canterbury University, Christchurch
Represented New Zealand in 49th Venice Biennale in 2001
Nominated for ACK (2006), ARTSPACE 2006

The Finalists

Auckland-born artist Edith Amituanai, the winner of the inaugural Marti Friedlander Photography Award last year, observed and captured the lives of her relatives to show the private reality of public sporting lives in her Dejeuner series.

Auckland-born Lisa Reihana's Digital Marae began life as the multimedia installation Native Portraits commissioned for the 1997 opening of Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand as a response to the museum's stated vision to tell stories of living people as well as artefacts. Digital Marae has expanded and evolved into a virtual marae for a changing urban world.

Auckland-born artist John Reynolds creates his cultural portrait of New Zealand from our nation's ever changing English through quoting Harry Orsman's The Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English 1997 in his 2006 Biennale of Sydney work Cloud.

The Judge

This year Catherine won the Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, in New York. She was selected for the award by a panel of leading critics, curators and art experts, which praised her most recent collaborations between institutions in the Arab World and the art world as being particularly important for our time, and acknowledged her as someone whose contributions have shaped the way we conceive exhibition making today.

David has worked at the National Museum of Modern Art at the Centre Georges Pompidou (1982-90), the Galerie National du Jeu de Paume (1990-94) and the Witte de With, center for contemporary art in Rotterdam (2002-04).

She is highly regarded for her groundbreaking role as director of documenta X (1994-97) and her acclaimed project Contemporary Arab Representations 1 and 2, produced in association with the Tàpies Foundation (2003). More recently, she was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2005-06), where she worked towards a project entitled Di/Visions: Culture and politics of the Middle East (2007).

Image: Photograph by Bryan James,
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

01/11/08