The Converse x Dazed Emerging Artists Award 2015
18 April - 17 May 2015
Burlington Gardens
Saturday – Thursday 10am – 6pm
Friday 10am – 10pm
Free.
Friends of the RA go free
A celebration of exciting new talent in the art world, the Converse x Dazed Emerging Artists Award is one of the most prestigious competitions for UK artists at the start of their career. In 2015 for the first time, we host work by the winners in our Burlington Gardens galleries.
Uniquely, artists were invited to enter work in any discipline, whether it be video, sculpture, painting, drawing or even performance art. The resulting exhibition promises to be an eclectic spectacle of innovative original work, showcasing the brightest and best new UK artists.
This winner of this year's prestigious £5000 prize is Lawrence Lek. His work, Unreal Estate imagines a future Royal Academy of Arts in the form of a first-person video game for visitors to play – reconfiguring the RA buildings as a giant, glitzy, dystopian playground for the super-rich.
In an exhibition curated by Susanna Davies-Crook, Lek's work is exhibited alongside that of the four other finalists; Jonathan Trayte, Rachel Pimm, Tamsin Snow and Sarah Tynan, and Patrick Cole. All five shortlisted artists were given £1000 to create their site-specific work for our galleries. Find out more about this year's shortlisted artists here.
The award was this year judged by a distinguished panel of experts including Steven Claydon, Sarah McCrory, José Parlá, Javier Peres, Francesca Gavin and our very own Director of Artistic Programmes, Tim Marlow.
Converse and Dazed both have a long history of championing creativity and we are privileged to have them as our partners. If you want to see where contemporary art is heading in this country, this free exhibition is compulsory viewing.