Blake Prize: Emerging Religious Artists Take on Established for Fiercely Fought Accolade

THE GUARDIAN
By Andrew Frost

Contender: The Edge, 2013, by Tamara Dean. Photograph: Olsen Irwin Gallery

AUSTRALIA---The shortlist for the 62nd Blake prize has been announced, naming 73 established and emerging artists. The prize explores religious and spiritual themes in art and, although that might suggest traditional religious subjects and treatments, the attraction of the Blake for many artists – and often the source of the prize’s occasional conflicts with conservative – is that it also encourages and celebrates secular ideas of religiosity, as well as broader questions of the role of ethics and morality in contemporary society. [link]