Australian artist Ildiko Kovacs wins $80,000 Bulgari art award

Ildiko Kovacs has won the the $80,000 Bulgari art award, Australia’s richest art prize, for her abstract painting Onda.

Known for her expansive, colourful, emotional works, the New South Wales artist has exhibited at galleries across Australia for more than three decades, including a major survey show, Down the Line, at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery in 2010.

Her distinctive style uses rollers instead of brushes and plywood in place of canvas, as she adds and removes layers of paint over time in her Bundeena studio by the sea (“Onda” in Italian means wave).

The 2015 prize was announced by Michael Brand, director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, into whose collection Onda will be added in a $50,000 acquisition. The remaining $30,000 prize value is a three-month artist’s residency in Rome.

That trip will echo the first visit Kovacs made to Europe in 1980, which influenced her early painting. A later journey to Broome in Western Australia shifted her focus to the Australian landscape, and in 2005 she swapped her paintbrushes for the roller technique evident in Onda.

“When I start to paint I try to enter a space where preconceptions fall away,” said Kovacs of her work. “My process is reworking the surface many times leaving traces of history which dictates how the painting will evolve.”

Wayne Tunnicliffe, head curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of NSW, said he has long admired Kovacs’s “gestural brilliance”, which echoes the work of both Indigenous Australian artists and abstractionists like Brett Whitely.

“Onda exemplifies the artist’s innate understanding of colour and line, and further strengthens the gallery’s deep holdings of Australian abstract art,” said Tunnicliffe.

Kovacs is the first woman to win the Bulgari art award, which was established in 2012. Previous winners Jon Cattapan and Michael Zavros also attended the ceremony. The 2014 recipient Daniel Boyd is still on residency in Italy.