Belfast-born sculptor Siobhan Hapaska was widely regarded as the favourite to win this year's Glen Dimplex Artists Award and in the event she romped home comfortably.
Her only serious competitor was thought to be fellow Belfast native, sculptor Philip Napier. She was selected from a shortlist of six artists, in turn drawn from over 100 nominations.
The prize, organised in association with the Irish Museum of Modern Art, is Ireland's most prestigious visual arts award and is worth £15,000. This year an additional award "for a sustained contribution to the visual arts in Ireland", was won by the painter Louis le Brocquy. Hapaska lives and works in London, and is a graduate of Goldsmiths College, cradle of the current wave of neo-conceptual British artists. She deliberately avoids developing a characteristic style in her work, preferring to switch imagery, materials and techniques constantly. In practice she has veered from the current vogue for ultra-realistic figures to conceptual installations.
She describes her sculptures as "lost" objects that seem to materialise from nowhere. Stray, for example, in her Glen Dimplex show, is a tumbleweed that shuttles to and fro, mounted on a short section of track. Mule is a cast of part of a Ferrari car body lined with synthetic donkey fur. Hapaska looked convincing in a comparatively lacklustre exhibition of work by shortlisted artists. Napier's installation, consisting chiefly of twin fireplaces disgorging soot into their respective rooms, with an ambiguous roaring soundtrack, made a strong impression but left many visitors confused as to its intended meaning.
Of the others on the shortlist, German-born Hans Peter Kuhn, known for spectacular lighting displays, disappointed with just a low-key installation. Americans MacDermott and MacGough, a Gilbert and George-like partnership who make retro pastiche paintings, showed a cluttered melange of different works.
Dublin-born artist Janet Mullarney's sculptural installation Aftermath, which featured a woman lying intertwined with a bull on a mattress, was one of the strongest pieces in the show, but the general view was that her work, made chiefly from carved and painted wood, was too traditional to win.
This year's jury was composed of Thomas Sokolowski, director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Dominique Trucot, director of Le Confort Moderne in Poitiers, Paul O'Reilly, curator-director of the Limerick City Gallery of Art, Dr Margaret Downes, chairman of BUPA Ireland, Dr Paula Murphy, a lecturer in the history of art at UCD, and Brenda McParland, senior curator at IMMA.
The exhibition of work by shortlisted artists continues until July 5th.
