Omina Art Prize Finalists – Kate Hudson, Martin King, Robin Stewart and Marina Strocchi

Image above: Marina Strocchi The vineyards of Madden’s Lane 2023 acrylic on linen 122 x 152 cm

Congratulations to Kate Hudson, Martin King, Robin Stewart and Marina Strocchi who have been selected as Finalists in the 2024 Omnia Art Prize

The Omnia Art Prize & Exhibition
24 – 26 May 2024

Opening Gala and Announcement of Winner
Friday 24 May 7pm – 10pm

Smith Hall, St Kevin’s College
Moonga Road Toorak, VIC

This year’s prize will be judged by curator, writer and lecturer, Dr Rebecca Coates, Director of Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA).

Works exhibited are for sale, with proceeds from the event going to the St Kevin’s College Foundation to support the education of students in need or students experiencing hardship.

Image above: Robin Stewart Discovering Horus 2023 oil on linen with collage 97 x 92 cm

About the Omnia Art Prize and Exhibition

The Omnia Art Prize and Exhibition is an annual prize, open to established and emerging Australian contemporary artists, with all exhibited artworks for sale. Vibrant, culturally-rich and thought-provoking, the hundreds of artworks on display reflect the best of Australian contemporary art across mediums from oils, acrylics, drawing, photograph, mixed media to small sculptures.

Bringing together communities and artists across a full weekend of exhibition and events, the Omnia Art Prize and Exhibition champions contemporary artists at every stage of their careers, fostering connections among creators, designers, buyers, and art enthusiasts. It is a dynamic platform for the exchange of ideas and inspiration, enriching the cultural landscape with diverse perspectives and artistic expressions.

Above image: Martin King Dawn chorus, momento mori N.D. etching, liftground aquatint, spitbite, photopolymer intaglio, chine colle and wax 101 x 130 cm

Above image: Martin King Thinking about ledger of the lost N.D. photopolymer gravure, hardcover book and ribbon

Above image: Kate Hudson Grevilleas & banksia edition 35 2021 reduction linocut 26 x 22 cm

Above image: Kate Hudson Proteas and billy buttons edition 35 2020 reduction linocut 26 x 22 cm

Above image: Kate Hudson Scarlet banksia & bottlebrush edition 35 2021 reduction linocut 26 x 22 cm

Marina Strocchi – Featured in The Art of Healing magazine

Marina Strocchi’s insightful writing and a selection of her paintings are featured in her article ‘Art & Trauma’ in The Art of Healing magazine.
This piece details Strocchi’s inspiring experience working ‘out bush” with the Indigenous communities in Central Australia.

‘First Nations art in Australia is a unique phenomenon in the indigenous communities of the world. I believe that this uptake of painting in Australian indigenous communities has come about for a number of reasons. Life in a First Nations community is chaotic at times. People live with acute, chronic, complex and intergenerational trauma. Grief is ever present and funerals are never ending. To be able to settle into a painting which connects you to the songs of your grandparents is immediately soothing. Memories of travelling through your country, which may be far away and hard to travel to, can be evoked through the act of painting,” writes Strocchi

“In the world of art therapists, it is well known that the act of painting can take the traumatised person into a zone, or mental and physical state. It is in this zone where the healing begins.”

Image above: Marina Strocchi Amy in her paddock and the annoying agapanthus 2023 acrylic on linen 122 x 152 cm

To view a selection of Marina Strocchi’s available works click here

Marina Strocchi – Artist Profile Feature

Marina Strocchi Manhattan sunset 2020 acrylic on linen 25.5 x 35.5 cm

We are delighted to share Artist Profile’s feature on Marina Strocchi’s current solo exhibition, New York City.

Marina Strocchi left her residency New York City, returning home to Australia, just three weeks before its first Covid case was announced. Having grown up in Melbourne and worked throughout her career in the Northern Territory and Australia’s Central Desert, Strocchi was inspired to produce new, formally innovative works while reflecting on her time spent living in NYC.

In this new body of work, Strocchi approaches the mythic city on a haptic, and lusciously affective level. As a visitor – an Australian in NYC, that perennially recurring character – her perspective is constantly on the move, soaking in as much as possible as much of the time as possible. During her time in New York, Strocchi was living in Brooklyn and had a studio in Manhattan, and would frequently traverse the city between these two neighbourhoods. In an artist’s statement, she describes taking the D over the Manhattan Bridge, between the brownstones of her home and the 1920s warehouses where her studio was set. Focussing on movement through this city which is so ready to be read as symbolic, Strocchi is able to draw down a human, embodied experience of her setting from the ideas about it which run up and away into abstraction so easily. Columbus Circle in the snow, 2021, for example, foregrounds modes of transportation against skyscrapers – their patterning dense and idiosyncratic, like blue notes – in a tender and affectionate portrait of the cityscape as the artist anecdotally encountered it. In a sense, the architectural features of the city are approached like characters. Strocchi describes an interest in “the sheer mass and density of the buildings, the repetition of shapes, the walls of windows, sometimes reflecting, sometimes receding, and always towering over the mere mortals who inhabit them.”

To read the full article, visit the Artist Profile website.

New York City

Open 7 days 10am – 6pm

28 Derby Street, Collingwood.

Exhibition current until Saturday 30 April.

Click here to view the exhibition online.