Vancouver artist and writer Tiziana La Melia has won the 16th RBC Canadian Painting Competition, receiving the $25,000 prize Wednesday evening at a ceremony in Montreal. La Melia, in her early thirties, prevailed over 14 other finalists – eight women, six men – from across the country to take the honour, awarded annually to a Canadian “emerging painter” of promise.
A graduate of Emily Carr University in Vancouver and the University of Guelph in Ontario, La Melia won for a 101-cm-by-64 cm oil on board titled Hanging on to the part.
The nine jurors, which included gallerists, artists and curators, were impressed by the way La Melia combined “abstraction and figuration to portray both mythological female archetypes and personal narratives.” In a release, the jury acknowledged that while the work “comes from a tradition of painting, [it] offers a platform to consider theatre, poetry and popular culture as well, giving her painting a unique edge over the other finalists.” La Melia, born in Palermo, Italy, has said she’s interested in “the relationship between painting and poetry and in the theme of adolescence.”
Two runners-up were also named Wednesday. Winnipeg’s Ufuk Guery, an MA graduate from the Glagow School of Art, received $15,000 for his painting, a stylized representation, in oil and acrylic on canvas, of a sausage called Market. Nicolas Lachance, a Montreal-based graduate from the Université du Québec à Montréal, received the same amount for his work Index no. 3 The book of empathy (acrylic and gesso on canvas on medium-density fibreboard).
Their work and that of La Melia now enters the RBC Corporate Art Collection, which currently numbers more than 4,000 artifacts. Established in 1999, the competition divides the country into three regions (western, central, eastern), with a three-member panel from each region choosing five finalists for the national face-off. This year’s finalists were announced in mid-June, culled from 600 entrants.
All 15 finalists’ paintings are currently on view at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art through Oct. 8. They’ll also be displayed Oct. 24-27 at the Art Toronto fair.