The inner Melbourne, Richmond-based Lennox St Gallery is small but lavish, right down to the hotel suite-like toilets. Its new exhibition, the 2025 Art Award, shows 21 works from artists under 35 years old from across Australia, and the level of quality and diversity is incredibly high. Going by the ‘About’ page, the gallery showcases the works of “established, mid-career and emerging artists”.
There are many genres on display here, all delivered with artistry and skill. Alexander Dowthwaite’s Sir John is a portrait of a medieval scholar done in a style that wouldn’t have looked out of place during the Italian Renaissance. Ruby Li’s symphony of cross-cultural surrealism, The Worst Birthday Party Ever, is presumably a child’s memory manifested with an artist’s eye, with feelings becoming symbolisms, including a crying Chinese lion with a clown’s nose and a burning biplane plummeting in the background.
Those two artworks alone show the wonderful diversity on show. Studies of realism and light are shown in Hamish Flemming’s brilliantly composed and lit The Roof is Leaking, and Dani McKenzie’s Early Riser is a beautifully subtle window-within-a-window image, which looks out to a snow-covered sunrise from within a warm cabin. The hues of blue, black and different shades of orange and red combine to create an understated but striking image.
Other excellent portraits are Tania Babic’s Identity, a graphite on board study of a girl and her cat (or should that be a cat and her girl?), and Grace Stevenson’s The Imposture, the subject of which looks like she belongs in Area 51.
2025 Art Award: abstract works
The show is filled with other genres, mediums, topics and styles, but that’s what was disappointing when the winners were announced on Saturday at the exhibition’s opening. Both the overall winner (Tim Wilson’s Parts of It), and both the highly commended entries, are abstract works.
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They are different styles of abstract; for instance, having shades of minimalism, retro impressionism and classic abstraction, and they use different mediums, but having these three abstract works win while being surrounded by such a diverse and high-quality range of styles, displayed to this reviewer a baffling case of genre favouritism on the part of the judges. Once again quoting from the ‘About’ page, the gallery seeks to “reflect the diverse landscape of contemporary practice”; these winners suggest otherwise.
2025 Art Award: people’s choice voting
It will be interesting who wins the People’s Choice Award, to be announced towards the end of the exhibition. You can vote for your favourite here.
This is an excellent exhibition. It’s literally around the corner from the Corner Hotel, so check it out on the way to your next gig there.
2025 Art Award at the Lennox St Gallery will be exhibited until 2 August 2025; free entry.
Discover more arts, games and screen reviews on ArtsHub and ScreenHub.
Also on ArtsHub: Exhibition review: Five Acts of Love, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
Palestinian artist and filmmaker Larissa Sansour and her Danish director/scriptwriter partner Søren Lind use the metaphor of the mansion as ‘the seat of memory’ in this experimental documentary Familiar Phantoms, 2023. Interweaving threads of family, history, trauma, memory and identity from both a personal and a national perspective, it beautifully captures the underlying tone of this group exhibition Five Acts of Love, currently showing at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne. Read more…
