Every autumn we sponsor the painting prize at the Royal Ulster Academy's Annual Exhibition, and every autumn the same thing happens: a walk round the Ulster Museum with a long list that has to become a short one, and then a single name. This year that name is Chris Wilson RUA, for a work called Living Space. The prize was presented at the RUA's prizegiving on Saturday 17 October, and we're delighted to be able to say so out loud at last.
The work
Living Space stops you. Most of the canvas is given over to great pale slabs of surface — veined and fractured like marble, or ice, or a dried-out lake bed — split by a dark seam that runs almost the full height of the picture. And then, right along the top edge, under a band of night, a row of small white houses. Tiny. Lit. Sitting on the lip of all that cracked emptiness as if nothing were the matter.
It's the scale that does it. The houses are the only thing in the picture at human size, and they occupy perhaps a hundredth of it. The title lands differently once you've noticed that. What we chose it for, in the end, was that it rewards the second look and the third — it's a painting about where we live that keeps quietly changing its mind about what that means.
The artist
Chris Wilson was born in Glengormley in 1959 and trained at Brighton and then the University of Ulster. Many people will know him first as a sculptor — his public commissions are around the country, and his work sits in the collections of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the Arts Council of Ireland, the Office of Public Works in Dublin and others. He won the RUA Gold Medal and the Paul Henry Landscape Prize in the same year, 2015, and has exhibited across Ireland, Britain, Europe and North America. Science, landscape and night skies run through the recent work, and all three are in Living Space.
You can see more at chriswilsonartist.com and on Instagram at @chriswilson_art.
Why we sponsor it
We've been selling paint on Callender Street for over forty years, and a good proportion of what hangs in the RUA each year was made with materials that went out of our door. Sponsoring the painting prize is the obvious way to put something back into the people who make the work. It's also, frankly, the best afternoon of our year: a hundred-odd paintings, no sales pitch, and the simple job of deciding which one we can't stop looking at.
A word too for the painters we know from the other side of the counter who are hanging in this year's show. Choosing one work is not a judgement on the rest, and the standard across the room this year made the job harder than usual.
Go and see it
The 145th RUA Annual Exhibition runs at the Ulster Museum from 18 October until 3 January 2027, open Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm, and admission is free. Living Space is worth the trip on its own; the rest of the show — painting, sculpture, print, photography and craft, with Andrew Gifford as this year's invited artist — is the bonus. Our thanks to Simon McWilliams and everyone at the Royal Ulster Academy for having us again.
Congratulations, Chris.
