We are thrilled to announce the Grand Prize Winner for the inaugural Sovereign Portuguese Art Prize, Sponsored by EON Reality. Read on to meet our winner, discover his artwork, and hear his thoughts on his win.

GRAND PRIZE WINNER

Jorge Queiroz 
Duende

Having received the highest score from our panel of judges, Queiroz will take home the Grand Prize of €25,000 for his work Duende (pictured below). Using both drawing and painting in his practice, Queiroz creates a dialogue between his media through which they both contaminate and influence each other. His work is characterised by an absence of linguistics and narrative linearity. Instead, he prefers to develop his own universe: an enigmatic, extravagant, and even alchemical one.

His work invokes a strong sense of polarity, existing in the space between sense and nonsense, logic and the illogical, the conscious and the unconscious, full and empty, abstract and figurative, narrative and fragment. Or, inspired by the words of writer Garcia Lorca, the artist posits whether everything both ‘is’ and ‘is not’ at the same time, in a permanent state of transmutation.

Queiroz is the first ever winner of this annual Prize for contemporary artists from Portugal and its diaspora. He was selected from a shortlist of 30 artists and awarded with his prize last evening at an awards ceremony in Porto.

When asked about his victory, Queiroz said:

“It was a wonderful and very big surprise… I am very happy. This piece was made for a text of the Duende for a literary conference in Madrid… To be noticed, to be visible and fill yourself, your work, as value for others, is so important.”

Thank you to everyone to all their support of The Sovereign Portuguese Art Prize. A special thank you goes out to our esteemed judging panel, including artists Ai Weiwei and Joana Vasconcelos; Vicente Todolí, Founding Director of  Serralves Contemporary Art Museum; David Elliott, freelance writer, curator and former Founding Director of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Maura Marvão, Head of Phillips in Portugal and Spain; Phillippe Vergne, French curator and Director of the Serralves Contemporary Art Museum and Tim Marlow, Chief Executive and Director of the Design Museum, London. 

The public vote is still OPEN – click here to vote for your favourite artwork. 

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