neo:studios
neo:studios is an artist led, not-for-profit organisation founded to aid the development of creative practitioners. Neo:studios run a series of high profile international open exhibitions including the neo:artprize. This prize is an international open exhibition, attracting submissions from over 25 countries, aiming to raise awareness of new trends and directions in the contemporary art world. The also provide a platform for artists to showcase excellence and innovation.
GreatArt have been supporters of neo:studios and their open exhibitions for a number of years and support with prizes for the neo:artprize, neo:residency and neo:printpize.
Congratulations to this year’s winner of the GreatArt Award at neo:artprize, Narbi Price!
Introducing our Winner
Narbi Price’s work involves journeys to specific places that have witnessed a range of events – variously historical, famous, personal or forgotten. He researches the precise location of a chosen event, ranging from significant moments in music, film and TV, whimsical acts through to places of violence and death amongst others. Working from photographs taken at the site, he makes paintings in the studio focussing on the abstract, formal and painterly qualities of the resultant images.
This process removes the conscious choice of subject matter; he must work with whatever is present at the spot. Whilst clearly photographically derived, the paintings use the language of abstraction to simultaneously acknowledge and disrupt the representational image. The paint is transparent, opaque, glossy, matt, dilute and impasted, often within the same work. As viewers, we are not immediately made aware of the specific histories of the sites and are given space to wonder about the multiplicities of events that might have taken place, an effect heightened by the painting method. Our experience of the work shifts as we become aware of the provenance of the depicted sites.
The two works in the exhibition are part of the recent body of work ‘The Ashington Paintings’, a body of 30 paintings made for Narbi’s PhD at Newcastle University, a longitudinal study of the post-industrial town in Northumberland.
To see more of Narbi’s work, please visit his website
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