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New Light Prize Exhibition 2017/18

@ The Bowes Museum

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In the magnificent surroundings of The Bowes Museum the New Light Prize Exhibition, one of the North’s largest open exhibitions, announced the winners of five major awards and prizes, before the gallery doors were opened to reveal the artistic talent the North should be celebrating.

A bustling and exciting Private View saw Yorkshire-born artist Christopher Cook awarded the £10,000 Valeria Sykes Award for his graphite and resin drawing entitled ‘Forbidden Fruit’. Although Christopher now lives in Devon, an important motivation for him entering the New Light Prize Exhibition this year was the venue and the fact that it sits next to his old school. Cook says, “as a young pupil at Barnard Castle School we would often be taken to draw inside The Bowes Museum. One of the earliest schoolboy drawings I still possess is a view of the Museum’s exterior. It is an extraordinary feeling to have been awarded the Valeria Sykes Award in the very place I learnt to draw.”

This high profile biennial Prize Exhibition, featuring 88 artworks by 72 artists, is currently open at The Bowes Museum, Co. Durham before touring to Yorkshire’s Huddersfield Art Gallery, the Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle and the Bankside Gallery, London throughout 2018. The exhibition is a chance to discover some of the North’s finest contemporary paintings, sculpture, prints and drawings. The artworks, all for sale, range from hyperreal portraits, to gritty urban scenes, abstract paintings, expressive oil landscapes and meticulously drafted drawings.

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