British Art Prize 2021

£27,000 of new art competitions, Sistine Chapel of the Ancients, Shirazeh Houshiary, Art Opportunities

Dec 01, 2020

New Art Competition

A brand new national art competition for the new year from Artists & Illustrators. A prize fund value of over £10,000, London exhibition and magazine exposure. The winner gets to follow in the footsteps of Van Gogh in a (hopefully post pandemic) Viking river cruise worth £7,000, visiting Lyon, Provence and Arles.

Other new additions include the British Ceramics Biennial - £15,000 prize fund (closes 8th Dec) and the Bee Friendly Sculpture Competition - £2,000 + costs (closes 1st Feb).

‘A February Day’ by Rowland Hilder, watercolour, 20th cent - £138 Giclée print

From 1st - 8th December your donation to participating charities can be doubled.

Sistine Chapel of the Ancients

One of the world’s largest collections of prehistoric rock art has been discovered in the Amazonian rainforest and it’s been worth the 12,500 year wait. José Iriarte, leader of the expedition team describes the amazing find:

“When you’re there, your emotions flow. We’re talking about several tens of thousands of paintings. It’s going to take generations to record them … Every turn you do, it’s a new wall of paintings. We started seeing animals that are now extinct. The pictures are so natural and so well made that we have few doubts that you’re looking at a horse, for example. The ice-age horse had a wild, heavy face. It’s so detailed, we can even see the horse hair. It’s fascinating.””

Iranian installation artist and former Turner Prize nominee Shirazeh Houshiary talks with great clarity on her working process (3 mins)

“It’s about the fusion of the precise, which is my own marking, with something which is very chaotic. There’s a friction and collision between the two, and to fuse the two takes a lot of energy because they tend to not want to be connected but that’s where life happens!”