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Adam Portrait Awards 2008

Opening 6pm, Thursday 17 April

Exhibition runs until 8 June 2008

New Zealand's premier portrait painting competition, sponsored by the Adam Foundation and the National Portrait Gallery, is held every two years in Wellington. There were over 300 initial entries from all over New Zealand, and 103 selected for final judging. Lopdell House Gallery is delighted to be bringing a selection of this year's best portraits to Auckland.

'A new Venus' is how Canadian judge Dr Lilly Koltun described the image portrayed in the winning entry. Dr Koltun, who is Director General of the Portrait Gallery of Canada and was in Wellington especially to judge this year's competition, awarded first prize to Irene Ferguson for her portrait of 'The Blue Girl, Johanna Sanders in her Back Yard'. 'This artist has huge potential', Lilly Koltun said. 'She has produced a major work that achieves a highly accomplished sense of realism, and is assured and convincing. It reaches a level of exactness and accuracy that makes it contemporary, but she has also simplified all the elements to create a new definition of Venus. It can be seen as a 21st century interpretation of Gainsborough's Blue Boy, in an image for our own time.'

The winning artist, Wellingtonian Irene Ferguson, has studied at the Otago School of Fine Art, at the New York Academy of Fine Art and with Jeff Koons (2005), and has exhibited widely both in New Zealand and overseas.

Image pictured right: No to Botox, self portrait, Jan Eagle